Dedalus Lecture 2023: Belinda McKeon - Featuring Kevin Curran's 'Youth'

For the Bloomsday Dedalus Lecture 2023, author Belinda McKeon (Solace, Tender) delivered the museum’s annual lecture inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, drawing on a range of contemporary Irish novels, including Kevin Curran’s Youth. Read the lecture below.

LANDLORD NEVER DIES THEY SAY

Inhabiting Fiction in Contemporary Dublin

In December 2018, at Sotheby’s London, the auction catalogue entitled English Literature, History, Society, Children’s Books and Illustrations contained a lot which was none of those things: an iron latchkey, thin and brown and intricately knobbled with rust, 98mm long and noticeably warped with age. This was the key to 7 Eccles Street, the fictional home of Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses, a fictional home which was based on a real rowhouse on that Northside Dublin street. In the 1960s, shortly before the demolition of number 7 and its surrounding neighbours, the literary scholar Louis Muinzer managed to secure the key from the foreman in charge of the wrecking ball.

The front door also survived, and is now in the James Joyce Centre, along with the huge key for the Martello Tower in which the novel commences, but let’s focus on the Eccles Street key, and on the fact that it still exists because it was – let’s use a term more accurate than “secured” – it was wheedled. One man had the key, and another man managed to walk away with the key. Since then, someone else has walked away with it; someone with pockets deep enough to pay £7500 at that Sotheby’s auction. What of Bloom, whom we see searching his trousers pockets in vain for the key to 7 Eccles Street in the small hours of June 17^th, 1904 – he ventured out into the city without it, it transpires, and not for the first time that day; what would he make of this hammer price? An “eggsniping transaction”, maybe, to use his phrase from the “Eumaeus” episode.

You know who could have done with that key, or rather the thousands of pounds it turned out to be worth? Stephen Dedalus. His debt – Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.  Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea, Fred Ryan, two shillings.  Temple, two lunches.  Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five weeks’ board, as we’re told in “Nestor” – comes to £25, not far short of £4000 in today’s money. He doesn’t have that money, though – “the lump I have is useless”, he broods, referring to the meagre pay-packet he has received from his employer, Deasy – and nor, as it happens, does he have a key.

Ulysses opens with an eviction; the eviction of a young artist. Stephen Dedalus, despite the fact that he has paid rent for the Martello Tower he unhappily shares with Mulligan and Haines, surrenders the key to them, knowing that Haines, the Englishman, wants it. “I will not sleep here tonight,” Stephen thinks as he walks away from them, the Englishman and the Usurper. “Home also I cannot go.” As evictions go, it is something of an own-goal; Stephen renders himself homeless in a kind of funk. But it is also a portrait of a city, and of a country, in which the notion of home, and of being at home, is deeply unstable. Dublin is home to Joyce’s characters. Or rather, Joyce’s characters regard Dublin as home. Or at least, they are in Dublin, for now. The question of how secure is their tenure in the city, how truly open to them are the many doors of Dublin which are passed, and entered, and left ajar through this one long day in the middle of June; this is a question answered by Ulysses in ever-multiplying images of transience and precarity, powerlessness and incertitude. Questions of ownership and tenancy vex every episode. Tenancy: from the Latin tenere, to hold, to keep. Who holds what? Who has lost what they held? Who will never hold anything? By the penultimate episode, we have come to understand that neither Stephen nor Bloom are keyholders; rather, they are, as Bloom describes them as they stand outside 7 Eccles Street, under the second-floor advertisement for “unfurnished apartments”, a ‘premeditatively…and inadvertently, keyless couple.” Stephen is the premeditator, Bloom’s homelessness is inadvertent, though any psychoanalyst would swiftly inform him otherwise; tortured by thoughts of another man entering his marriage bed, he has evicted himself just as much as has Stephen. But at the level of consciousness – drunken consciousness, but still consciousness – they inhabit very different kinds of keylessness. Bloom, although he has lived in so many places (“, run from many landlords, and although he himself is a renter, clearly feels some security – probably naively – in his lodgings. Indeed, he obviously imagines himself as a kind of landlord, given that advertisement in the window, in which he and Molly offer up space within their home to strangers in need of a bed – for a price, of course. Bloom, with the assured movement of a homeowner, reaches “mechanically” back into his pocket, expecting the key to be there, expecting home to be simply a matter of a door. I will sleep here tonight, he is effectively saying, in contrast to Stephen’s morning epiphany about the Tower. But Bloom has also shaken off his own bleak epiphany from earlier, that moment in “Lestrygonians”, with Bloom passing the “surly front” of Trinity College, from which I’ve taken my title today:

One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt, Kerwan’s mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

Bloom can pay his rent. Or, he should be able to, between expected commissions – one of them, it’s impossible not to notice, for a company called Keyes – and his Canadian bond investment. Whether he will be careful enough with his money to do so is another matter. Molly’s thoughts in her monologue tell us that precarity has been their life:

God here we are as bad as ever after 16 years how many houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard street and Holles street and he goes about whistling every time were on the run again his huguenots or the frogs march pretending to help the men with our 4 sticks of furniture and then the City Arms hotel worse and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them always know who was in there last…

This housing precarity – this being subjected to the pongs and pecadillos of ever new stranger-neighbours – is partly down to Bloom making a hames of their finances, their security and his own employment prospects: “every time we’re just getting on right,” says Molly, “something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies…”  But it is also, to use a phrase often used in conversations about the precarity of housing in Dublin today, systematic. Note that in Ulysses, three men are keyholders: Buck Mulligan, the usurper; Myles Crawford, the newspaper editor, and John O’Connell, the caretaker, who can lock all the souls in behind the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery. Bloom fantasises about being given the keys of Dublin on a crimson cushion, he tries to place an ad for his client, Alexander Keyes,  and, in “Ithaca” we are treated to a long mental Pinterest board of his dream home, Flowerville, but at no point does he hold in his hand an actual key.

And this is apt. As Andrew Gibson points out in a 2013 essay on property law in Ulysses, the period from 1878 to 1904, a period which spans from Joyce’s birth to his departure from Ireland, land law took centre stage in Ireland, with the formation of the Land League and legislation including the Land Act, the Arrears Act, and the Land Purchase Act – ostensibly attempts to take the legal structure governing property occupation beyond a colonial vice-grip, but in reality none of it did anything to break the grip of landlord power. There was little hope of reform when it came to tenant rights, and in the Dublin of Ulysses, inner-city Dublin, tenancy is general. Inhabitants of Eccles Street and Lombard Street and Holles Street and Raymond Terrace do not own; they rent, and under agreements more suited to rural and agricultural property law than to the life of a city. An apartment dweller in 1904 enjoys no more security than a family packed into a tenement, who enjoy no more security than a peasant farmer, on a yearly lease which can be terminated at will; evictions were common, rents were jacked up, often by subletters like those advertising “unfurnished apartments” in the windows of their own rented houses, and there was no will to improve or repair properties.

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on

  “Even aside from the financial toll of renting, consider the psychological hardship of trying to make a life for yourself and your family in what is ultimately someone else’s spare house. Your home – your place in the world, your refuge, the stage for all the private dramas of your intimate life – can be taken away from you at any time, through no fault of your own, for the financial benefit of someone wealthier than you are. This is obviously not the life most of us would choose for ourselves.”

Those are the words of novelist Sally Rooney, from an opinion piece published in the Irish Times in March of this year, in the week in which the Government announced that it was “phasing out” the moratorium on tenant evictions nationwide which had been put in place five months previously in response to a rising housing and homelessness crisis. In a country in which, between 2010 and 2021, average rent prices increased by almost 70 per cent, and in which the median worth of a person is 60 times higher when they are a homeowner rather than a renter, Molly Bloom could well still comment that “here we are as bad as ever.” Rooney’s intervention was complemented by an article in the same newspaper in May, by the non-fiction writer Ana Kinsella; a piece which was less furious but perhaps even starker in its portrait of a place, this time specifically Dublin’s inner city, in which “a texture and a richness” which city living can lend to people’s days is sorely lacking, because the city does not welcome residential inhabitants. As a returned emigrant, Kinsella’s focus was the Georgian houses of streets on her daily running route, around Fitzwilliam and Merrion Square; why are these houses all occupied, and under-occupied at that, by commercial tenants, she asked, by accountants and solicitors who, in any case, probably work from home for half the week? Meanwhile, development after development of brand new commercial office space goes up in the same area, and development after development of brand new commercial office space appears to be drastically underused. “After dark,” Kinsella wrote, “the place becomes a graveyard.” She finished with a love letter to Dublin: “The city, at its heart, belongs to its people, not its property developers…there is more to these streets than the growth and transfer of money between one business and the next.” That sense of Dublin as a place in which to spend money, rather than a place to spend your ordinary days, comes through very strongly also in the regular, impassioned pieces on Dublin as a city in crisis – culturally, aesthetically, and as a place in which a person, particularly an artistic person, might make a life – by the journalist Una Mullally, who evoked a street scene worthy of Ulysses recently when she wrote about the litter and grime coating the city’s footpaths.  “If you like your shoes sticking to the path, the smell of urine filling your nostrils, and your stroll filthy underfoot, then Dublin provides for that.” Mullally’s pieces blast city planning policy which has, for over a decade, prioritized the building of office space, more and more hotels, and expensive student or transient worker accommodation over the creation of a liveable, enjoyable modern Dublin. “There are very few places,” she writes, “where one can simply hang out in Dublin city that aren’t transactional. There are no large public squares to relax in that facilitate the simple activity of having a beer or a coffee, where you can watch life go by.”

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on.

The key motif is one of the ways in which Joyce portrays the pinched reality of life as a Dublin resident in Ulysses. There are also, of course, considerations of citizenship and community, commercialism and artistry, escapism and despair; these, and many more of the ingredients which make up an early twentieth-century Dublin “cagework city”, to take an image from the “Proteus” episode.

But in an age when the key has become the lockbox of the Airbnb apartment or the keypad of the co-living student accommodation block, or the plastic card emblazoned with the faux-ristocratic name of one of what seems like a thousand new hotels, how do contemporary novelists of Dublin respond to the question of inhabiting this city?  I’m going to think about this by looking at three recent novels set or partly set in Dublin: Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Emilie Pine’s Ruth & Pen, and Kevin Curran’s Youth. Whether by design or simply because it’s impossible to write fiction about Dublin and not do so, all three novels seem to nod to Joyce and to Ulysses in rich and interesting ways, but it’s the richness with which they portray present-day Dublin, and what it is like to live here, and to try to keep living here, which will be our focus.

“I am going crazy,” Alice writes to her friend Eileen in the second chapter of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, “thinking about the rent you’re paying in Dublin. You know it’s more expensive there now than Paris? And forgive me, but what Paris has Dublin lacks. One of the problems is that Dublin is, and I mean literally and topographically, flat – so that everything has to take place on a single plane. Other cities have metro systems, which add depth, and steep hills or skyscrapers for height, but Dublin only has short squat grey buildings and trams that run along the street. And it has no courtyards or roof gardens like continental cities, which at least break up the surface – if not vertically, then conceptually.”

Beautiful World, Where Are You is only in part a Dublin novel, in that only one of its two main characters, Eileen, lives in the city. But the novel’s split setting is a function of its portrayal of the reality of living in Dublin today. That is, there are good reasons why it is only partly set there. Alice and Eileen are close friends who went to college together in Dublin. But now Alice, as a novelist, can’t bear to live in the city any longer. It’s not that she’s too poor to do so; on the contrary, her novels have made her rich and famous. But the most recent time she was a resident of the city was as a patient in a psychiatric hospital, after a breakdown, and now she lives in an old rectory in the West of Ireland, which she rents, but only because she hasn’t yet decided whether she wants to buy it outright. As for Eileen, as we’ve just heard, she’s paying “crazy” rent to share a small apartment with people she barely knows, spending most of her time at home in her bedroom, and for her work as the editor of a literary magazine, she makes in the region of twenty thousand euro a year – five grand above the poverty threshold.

Alice’s critique of the cityscape – flat and squat, everything taking place on a single plane – is more than just a comment on architecture or urban planning; echoing Stephen’s attempt at stereoscopic vision rather than mere two-dimensional – “flat” – perception on Sandymount Strand, it points to an existential malaise, a resistance of a flattened, thinned-out sense of genericism, which is part of the reason why she herself does not want to be in Dublin, not even, it seems, for a visit. When she travels internationally with her books, she passes through Dublin, but, to Eileen’s disappointment, doesn’t linger in the city or make an attempt to visit her friends there. For Rooney’s artist character, Dublin is no longer a place to be, but rather a departure airport for somewhere else. Replying to Eileen’s guilt-tripping email about her secret flights in and out of the capital, Alice satirises her intentions in a way that positions Dublin as not a real city at all, but as a tourism campaign akin to the Wild Atlantic Way or Ireland’s Ancient East: “are you writing to me personally,” she asks Eileen, “or in your capacity as friendship ambassador for the greater Dublin region?”

In another long email exchange later in the novel, in which the two women debate beauty and the obvious decline of aesthetic and other standards in public and cultural life, Alice comes again to this idea of the campaign: “Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly,” she writes. She goes on: “The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defence; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition…I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.”

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a novel in which Dublin has failed the young people who want to make a home there. Eileen is a talented writer too, but her talent will likely come to nothing; no less Joycean a metaphor than that of paralysis is evoked by Rooney when we are told about the dissociative funk into which Eileen slipped on the one occasion she was approached by an editor and offered the possibility of a book deal. She left the email unanswered and eventually just deleted it. So she will probably leave no trace of herself in the world, she writes to Alice: no books, no children. “When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for? But even that seems so beyond me that it’s like a dream, completely unrelated to anything in reality.” If Eileen does end the book with some level of security – a small house in the Liberties – it is reliant not on her own prospects but on those of a partner, a boyfriend with a higher-paid job as a political consultant. On a campaigner, in other words, however left-wing he may be. Oh, and his name is Simon: “a noisy self-willed man…Wore out his wife. Now sings.”

Emilie Pine’s 2022 novel Ruth & Pen is set in Dublin over the course of a single day – October 7, 2019 – and follows two women, unacquainted with each other – Ruth, a forty-something psychotherapist, and Pen, a teenager on the autism spectrum – as they head out into and across the city on their separate quests for the day. The novel is open and often exhilarating in its nods to Ulysses – Bloom’s wasteland vision becomes Pen’s panic attack, a vision of a drought-stricken, sun-scorched cityscape, Paddy Dignam’s funeral as a climate change protest in which a mock coffin is carried aloft outside the Dáil, and the maternity hospital at Holles Street becomes not a site of male invasion and entitlement (Stephen and his classmates drinking and monologuing in the waiting room, Bloom just showing up, also with drink taken, to check on his neighbour who is in her third day of labour) but, through the story of Ruth’s fertility struggles, a site for the realities of pregnancy, miscarriage, bleeding, hope, disappointment, work and pain. But, absorbing as these resonances with, and reinventions of, Joyce’s novel are, what I want to consider today is how Ruth & Pen portrays and reveals the city in which its characters live.

These are middle-class characters. They do not know immediate housing insecurity; they both live in the affluent suburbs, Ruth somewhere around Terenure, where she and her husband own their own home, and Pen with her mother and sister in Dun Laoghaire, in the house her mother purchased after her marriage to Pen’s father broke down. Ruth gets the bus into town, heading for her psychotherapy practice on Capel Street, and Pen takes the DART, heading for the climate change protest in the city centre, where she will meet with her friend Alice, with whom she is secretly in love, and who, she hopes, will today say “Yes” to her proposition of a date.

Like their 1904 counterparts, these characters survey the inner city on foot, and they take detailed note of what they see. Their observations present us with a vivid picture of Dublin as it was in the last unsuspecting months before lockdown. Ruth sees, and to a point likes, the gentrification of streets she still remembers in their older iterations: Cow’s Lane, “this invented street, with its yoga and tattoos and plants and books.” Capel Street, “with all its soup and sushi and bibimbap.” She notes the apartments everywhere, “So many of them thrown up. Damp. Fire risk.” She notices the many language schools, the “lurid” sign for the Leprechaun Museum, the giant discount store, the huge coffee chain, the chocolate café. But places she once knew are gone – the trimmings shop where she bought ribbons as a teenager, the food court under the archway; the archway has also seemingly vanished. At the corner of Dawson Street, there is a gap – “where there used to be a building, one of those ugly seventies constructions, eighties maybe, and now there is sky where there had been brown brick. The way things can disappear amazes her, the vanished arch, now this, from solid to air. Through the gap she sees the curve of a building, high windows. Why can’t they leave it like that, she wonders, put in a little park maybe, but the land is too valuable. Something else will be raised up, something not as good as air and sky.”

Ruth is walking the city streets on her way to Holles Street, where she has an appointment for a follow-up investigation into the fibroids which caused her to bleed irregularly earlier this year, and as she walks toward the hospital she cannot be free of flashbacks to the trauma of her miscarriage, which was diagnosed there but which happened at home, and of reminders of the ordeal and disappointment of repeated IVF cycles, and of her childlessness, which is a sorrow to her, and an exploded grenade within her marriage, and it is through the experience of all of these heavy emotions, and all of these painful realities, that her walk the through city is mapped out. She sees what is gone, what is vanished, what has been buried and junked and walled over; she sees the delicate, sedimented beauty of what is underneath all these cycles of shiny newness, how it peeks out in places, how it, too, is doomed to be bricked up. At the corner of Dawson Street, she sees a gap “where there used to be a building, one of those ugly seventies constructions, eighties maybe, and now there is sky where there had been brown brick. The way things can disappear amazes her, the vanished arch, now this, from solid to air. Through the gap she sees the curve of a building, high windows. Why can’t they leave it like that, she wonders, put in a little park maybe, but the land is too valuable. Something else will be raised up, something not as good as air and sky.” Ruth, middle-class, middle-aged, middle-income or probably a bit above, might, one would think, be comfortable in this city of middlebrow offerings, but she is not. She rents her office, and has petty disputes with her stingy landlord, and she cannot find peace in this city, guiltily passing the homeless in their sleeping bags (“he could be dead and they would not notice”), crowded off the footpaths by tourists and by men, unable to find a place to just sit.  “Café after cafe, on and on the choices and none of them are right. And here you are, this is what they did with the old street, knocked it down and turned it into glass and concrete and even when you look up, no variation, no beauty.”

For Pen – Penelope, the final episode – the coming generation, the sixteen-year-old who eats, sleeps and breathes terror for the climate, who counts carbon footprints like a teenager in another decade might have counted calories, there is a way in which this city can never truly feel like home, because everywhere she looks, she sees its future desolation. “Slate-grey sky. Slate-grey ground. Trees whispering. Limbo again. No blue.” She doesn’t have time to think about the past of the city, about things like the bog bodies and the viking boat that her father once took her to see in the National Museum. What, her father often asks, would the Vikings make of Dubh Linn now? “Pen doesn’t know and the crowd won’t let her think about it. There is a pulse in her head. And the light is changing.”

This is, remember, a city where space is only transactional. When Pen has another panic attack during the protest, her friend Alice wants to take her somewhere they can just sit down and breathe, somewhere Pen can recover and they can just be, and she thinks of the National Gallery, which is nearby, but then she worries: Maybe they need a ticket?

Entry to the permanent collection at the National Gallery is, of course, free. Entry to the light-filled lobby on Lincoln Place, with its long benches for sitting on and breathing on, is free. But these teenagers do not know this. They are of a generation that is primed for transactions at every turn, a generation that sees this city as a space that must, at all times, be met with ready money, and with the price of entrance. Otherwise, even the most ostensibly welcoming places reveal themselves to be stone-cold; later, as Pen wanders the streets in the aftermath of romantic disappointment, she walks past a building that she knows somehow is the Pro-Cathedral, and she only notices it “because of the sleeping bags on the steps.” The city for these teenagers is a mixture of the hostile – a guy with a scooter almost running Pen down, a guy in a car calling Alice over to his window while he masturbates – and of the dregs of kindness, middle-aged women who stop and ask if the girls are ok. It is a city that has failed to evolve: “the mix of old and new buildings,” Pen observes, “and the old ones are nicer.” It is an aspirational city, a pretending city: “the building on the corner has big windows covered with ads for the kind of shop that could be there”. It is a city that fakes beauty: “you look at the lights on the water and the lights on the ugly tower that-isn’t-ugly because it has pretty lights on it now, and who cares about carbon wgen this is so pretty”. It is a city which gives a teenager a pain in their chest because, she knows, she is tired and not breathing deeply enough. “Heart of the city, a broken heart,” Pen reflects with what might be adolescent melodrama, but sometimes, she tells us, “the pain in your chest and the heaviness and the lostness are because you have a broken heart and sometimes the metaphor is real.”

The third contemporary novel I want to consider today was published just this month. It’s Youth, the third novel from the Balbriggan writer Kevin Curran. It’s about four teenagers in that town in the north part of County Dublin: Balbriggan. Of the Citizen’s “high Balbriggan buskins”, for those of you who really know your “Cyclops” episode, but more on that in a moment. Youth is about four teenagers: Angel, Tanya, Princess and Dean. Two of them are the children of African immigrants, two of them were born to Irish parents. The novel opens with three young men – Angel, Isaac and Pelumi – heading out into the day. One of them has been busy with the razor, like Buck Mulligan, but he has not been grooming himself. Angel is a talented barber, who knows his way around a clippers and a curl sponge. He’s given his friends “trims” that “look fresh in the light”, and he’s proud. The boys are gathering with more teenagers to shoot a video for Pelumi’s new rap track, “Blazed Boy”. Pelumi is on the cusp going viral on YouTube, and not viral in the way that Bloom worries Molly’s Blazed Boy might be, but famous, successful, hitting the big time. Angel, though just a sidekick, wants to be in the shot.

Youth is a love song to Balbriggan. It is a meticulous guide to the geography of the town; Curran walked around to check all his details, down to the shape of the button on the pedestrian crossing. The parataxis of Balbriggan is an account of the meal-deal capital of County Dublin: there’s Libero’s Italian pizzas warming in the oven and shielded by dirty netting in the window; Borza with the blue neon signs saying value, value; Macari’s high top chrome counter guarding the fryer; SuperValu deli a trek past the fruit and veg, under the always-suspicious eyes of the security guard; Polski Delikatesy hiding its bland meats and sausages behind frosted glass lettering; Deli Burger in its prime location across from the monument, overlooking the Bracken; FLC, Noodle Box, Apache, Domino’s, Moti Mahal, Han Lin Palace, Coffee Pot, Supermac’s, Papa John’s, Mr Wu, the soup kitchen beside the dole office. And Spar.”

Like Ruth & Pen, Youth is sparking with nods to Ulysses. There’s Blazed Boy; there’s a hapless and hilarious masturbation scene which is paralleled not by fireworks but by a boxing match on TV; there is a library, which is a kind of home for one of the central characters; there are eateries, as we’ve just seen; there is a Nighttown – the club called the Home; there is the beach;  there is a Martello Tower of sorts – not the actual Martello Tower in Balbriggan, but the roof of the lifeguard’s hut, where teenagers gather, scheme and fight; there is, in Tanya, the girl who is being watched and wanked over – a video of her performing oral sex in a car park has gone viral in the locality. Although Tanya, one of the novel’s four central characters, is also, in her presence and in her way of finding her stride in her surroundings, a Bloom more than she is a Gertie, a combination of both Blooms, in fact, with her interlinking monologues to camera for her TikTok channel as she walks around the town, a stream-of-consciousness tapestry that shows us both how she wants to be viewed and how she views herself.

But I want to concentrate, for the last part of my lecture today, on the two immigrant teenagers, because through their experience, we get a sense not of how to reconstruct a Dublin that might be disappeared, but how to see the Dublin that has already, at the edges, in the fringes, in the towns and communities away from the centre, been taking form.

Princess lives in a rented flat with her mother and with her sister, a young mother who is just about getting by on her wage from a nail salon, and whose face has, in recent months, become drawn and her eyes dark. There is not enough to eat, and there is not enough money; no money, for instance, for Princess’s Leaving Cert fee, which is €116. For Princess, there is no room to study, which is why the library becomes like home, but the library is unreliable too, subject to noise, subject to closure because of damage; when a passing driver shouts “get a room!” at Princess and her boyfriend, they are telling the teenagers to do something seemingly impossible, something which seems, daily, to become more and more impossible in a systematic way. Princess wants to do Pharmacy at Trinity, but she can’t just wander in, like Bloom wanders into the pharmacy around the corner from Trinity; she needs 500 points, and a scholarship, and work experience. When she gets work experience, unpaid, in a local pharmacists, she ends up treated like a second-class citizen, doing work which seems like it came right from 1904: “I’m physically scrubbing the newspaper over the window, mixing the window spray with the seagull shit, creating a greyish black paste as I circle it around.”

The question of citizenship is a tense one in Youth. The xenophobia faced by many immigrants to Ireland is represented in the figure of Barry, a twenty-something layabout addicted to online porn, who grooms the vulnerable Tanya and rants angrily about the Nigerian children who play football in his estate. Barry is less a Cyclops than a Psycho – when Tanya first sees him, he’s hotboxing weed, “panned out on the couch, his eyes like Kermit the Frog’s.” But Barry, and another younger character in the novel, Paddy, seem positioned as versions of The Citizen; Barry, with his stylized appearance and a huge tattoo of celtic swirls on his leg, with his shouting at staff in the African and Polish stores to give Balbriggan shops back to Balbriggan people. Barry holds the lease to the barbershop which may give Angel and also Princess a place to grow; he has the power to keep these new Irish citizens keyless, a power he also spitefully grooms.

As for Paddy, he is the Blazed Boy of Pelumi’s rap track, a redhead with swagger and anger, whose crew carry knives. When Pelumi, the rapper, uses a greeting (“Alright Our”) that Paddy considers to belong to the vocabulary of the Irish alone, Paddy moves to incite his sidekicks to violence, in a scene which is Youth’s version of the ugliness in Barney Kiernan’s pub:

• You lads can’t say it. Alright our. It’s a Balbriggan thing.
• Hardly chap. Allow.
• I can say it. My lads here can say it. Aul lads from the Brig can say it. But you can’t say it, ye get me.
• You’re jarring bro. I’m from the Briggz. My boys here from the Briggz. These wet ends are dead, yeah, but they’re mine.
• They’re not yours, ourlad. They’ll never be yours.

                                                        (…)

• And you, Pelumi goes on. If ye weren’t such a fucking savage gripping yer balls like they’re gonna drop off, you’d say back to me, Alright Our, and we’d both dip then, chuffed, yeah, cause we saw each other and said we’re alright. Mandem gave good vibes, yeah, by telling each other we’re alright. But no, man stops there and cries You can’t say that.

All our boys go:

• Eeeyyyy, and wince like Paddy just got rocked.

Did Paddy just get rocked? To conclude, I’m going to glance back to those Balbriggan buskins which make an appearance in Cyclops. The scholar Barry Devine was working with the page proofs for the Cyclops episode in the University at Buffalo when he noticed, in the margins, a single word in Joyce’s hand: Balbriggan. In the Cyclops episode, a satirical portrait of the Citizen as an ancient Irish warrior king has him wearing Balbriggan buskins – leather boots. But what Devine found in the page proofs showed that the Balbriggan had been added to the buskins only in Joyce’s 1921 revision; when the episode was published in The Little Review in 1919, our man was wearing only buskins. Balbriggan was added in September 1921, exactly one year after the Sack of Balbriggan, a vicious Black and Tan attack on the town, in which two men were murdered and dozens of houses and premises burned down. It was an atrocity which made international headlines, and so, too, did its one-year anniversary. Devine argues that Joyce, having read some of the coverage, wanted to include a reference, however subtle, to the atrocity, and to revolutionary heroism and sacrifice, and did so by scribbling the word Balbriggan in his margins and adding it to the text.

In Youth, the two immigrant teenagers are the only characters to notice, in passing but with real interest, the monument commemorating the Sacking of Balbriggan. Even though Angel’s cultural reference point for a battle in which he himself takes part on Main Street is not the Irish War of Independence but the Battle of Wakanda from the 2018 film Black Panther, still he marvels over the monument to 1920 and what it means: “Some yutes were murdered on these streets a hundred years ago. No lie…the Briggz was shook when those British boys came and drenched men down on these streets. It’s a mad thing.” Meanwhile, Princess noticed the monument on her first day in Balbriggan two years ago; even now, she remembers the names – Sean Gibbons and Seamus Lawless – who were murdered.

In the texture of a place is written the layers of its history. Citizenship is the act of noticing, and remembering, and reinventing, those layers. A city which will not allow its citizens to be at home is a city locked away from itself. That Youth ends with a silver set of keys, beautifully wheedled by one pair of teenagers and beautifully handed over to another, allows us to end tonight with a note of optimism. But if this city is to continue to be a city in which novels are written and writers are made, there is work to be done.