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ON A BLUSTERY Tuesday afternoon, Marie Cullen is serving a customer from her fruit and vegetables stall on Moore Street. Cullen is a fourth generation street trader and has been selling her wares on the iconic street for several years.
It’s hard work, she explains.
“You normally get up around half six,” she starts. “I have a day’s work to do before I even come and do this job. I have kids to get out, I bring them to school. Then I go down, source my stuff on the market, come up with my goods, set up my stall and hopefully I’ll sell them.”
The fabric of the street has changed greatly over the years. Where once it was a lively outdoor food market, it is now a shadow of its former self. In recent years, the street has been blighted by antisocial behaviour as well as a controversial development plan that has never come to fruition.
As a result, the number of traders has dwindled and footfall has fallen.
“Dublin City has done nothing with the street,” says Cullen. “The street has gone to hell. It’s not safe for people. Young people might come down, but people with young families don’t want to walk down the street.”
With many Dubliners avoiding the street or opting to shop elsewhere, Cullen says she counts foreign nationals among her best customers these days. “We’d be lost without them,” she says.
In her view, the street needs two things: more policing and more vendors.
“That would attract people to walk down the streets,” she says. “It is lovely to walk down a market street and see all the colours, the vibrance. It’s beautiful to do it. But it’s not happening here.”
With only fifteen traders left on the street, Cullen says she and her colleagues are the last of a dying breed.
“We are the last of the traders. There will be nobody after us. My kids don’t want it.”
“[Dublin City Council] want the street back so they should do the decent thing and offer people compensation and ask them to leave. There are people in the autumn of their years and they would gladly go. But to think they’ve worked here all their life… the least Dublin City Council could do is offer them money to go.”
For the time being, Cullen will continue to ply her trade on the street – whatever the weather.
It’s not nice working in the rain when you’re in an open market! However you do meet nice people and you do get a laugh every day. The job is absolutely different every day.
Further up town, Helen Kelly is sitting beside her flower stall on Duke Street, smoking a cigarette and looking out onto Grafton Street.
It’s a busy weekday morning with punters traipsing up and down the thoroughfare, occasionally stopping to look at Kelly’s impressive display of bouquets.
“I’m here for most of my life, about forty years,” says Kelly. Her mother and sisters all worked in the trade and she followed in their footsteps.
So who buys her flowers? Tourists or locals?
“Not tourists, they don’t buy,” she says. “They’d be locals. Restaurants, hotels and we have a few customers who come in from outside the city to buy their flowers in here.”
With weeks to go until Christmas, she says business has yet to pick up for the festive season.
“At the moment, it’s slow. People, as you know, are probably waiting until their houses are clean to buy the flowers. Well, we’ll be hoping anyway. We’re waiting for the rush, but at the moment it’s not busy.”
Asked if there is anything the city could do to be more accommodating to traders such as herself, she has one suggestion.
“Public toilets – not only for me, but for tourists. They can’t believe it when they ask me are there public toilets and I tell them there are none.”
Due to her location, Kelly says she spends a lot of time fielding such questions.
“I’m like an information centre here,” she says. “I should be getting paid for that as well. We don’t mind, though.”
As for her favourite part of the job?
Meeting people. And you’re able to smoke outside. For now anyway!
Rose Draper has been a fixture on Camden Street for her entire life.
“I’ve been here since I was a child in a pram,” she says. “My mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother were all here.”
Like the generations of women before her, Draper sells fruit and vegetables to passersby.
She says the elements dictate when and how often she gets out.
“If it’s a bad morning weather-wise, we don’t bother coming out,” she says. “We could stay in three days a week if the week is bad. That goes with the job. We take advantage of the fine weather.”
It’s hard in the winter, it’s a joy in the summer. One compensates the other.
Over the years, she has witnessed the street undergo a significant transformation.
During the recession, Draper says that a number of businesses on the street closed. In the meantime, the area has become chiefly known for being home to bars, restaurants and nightclubs and become a “nighttime street”.
Draper says she would like to see more shops open in order to increase footfall during the day.
“We need more shops open around here,” she says. “If you pass down on the bus and you look at the amount of shutters down on the street, people are going to say, ‘There’s nothing really there, I’m not going to get off.’”
Similarly, the demographics in the area have changed.
“We’ve a lot more Europeans coming over here from all walks of life,” she says, noting that they are among her best customers.
As older residents have died and family homes have been sold, the area has become home to more renters than ever before. This makes it difficult to establish a more permanent customer base, says Draper.
“You’re only getting to know them after a few months and then they move on,” she says. “That’s the way it’s gone.”
With just three traders left on Camden Street, Draper says the future looks uncertain.
“They’ve died off and the younger kids won’t take it up,” she says. “There are better opportunities for the kids, there is better education for them and they don’t want to be standing here in the cold.”
“If I gave you a month to stand here, I think you’d run off after a few days. It has to be in you to do it. You have to have the hardiness in you.”
For now, Draper is just hoping the rain stays away over the coming weeks.
Yesterday was very bad, last week was very bad so I hope we get a bit of a break. Other than that, it’s back home to the house – to the cleaning!
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How do they get away with selling rotten fruit n veg?
Biggest eyesore of a street in the country.
@Fergus Fring: What ,what Fergus. One would want to pull one’s neck out.
@The Viking: It’s hideous. Cheap tat, cash for gold, second hand electronics shops and the street itself is constantly littered from street traders…
Next time you walk down it, take a look at these buildings with ‘historical significance’. Most of them have visible concrete blocks behind the windows on the second floor. Obviously no one living there because they’re so derelict and decrepit.
The street should be leveled and regenerated.
@Fergus Fring: Stay in Dundrum Town Centre if you don’t like character.
Quite a few negative comments on here. A bustling lively market is an asset to a city, an facility for shoppers and an attraction to tourists and in fact Dublin Tourism promotes the market but the reality must be disappointing to visitors. The market is being deliberately run down in order to facilitate the huge shopping centre plan — what some of the “level it and redevelop it” brigade no doubt would like — which is what most people do NOT want (and the Save Moore Street From Demolition campaign have the signatures to prove it).
Most of the street traders on Moore Street are fourth generation — one or two are fifth. The Council does not supply water, heating or light, only the meagre shelter of the stands. As Mary Kelly noted, no toilets either. They have a hard life and as Marie Cullen said, their children would not want it. But others might. However Dublin City Council will not issue any new licenses.
The small business shopkeepers also struggle, particularly those from the junction with Henry Place going north.
The Council provided large bins along the street and also street cleaning teams go up and down regularly (their depot is in Nos. 24/25). Recently they removed most of the bins and of course, cardboard boxes and paper do pile up and also blow along.
The buildings are deteriorating because the property speculator is waiting to demolish them (all except Nos.14-17, which are owned by the State).
An upgraded market and a walk-through historical experience in the upper floors would boost the area enormously. Kilmainham Jail, which the State was going to demolish until a community group began to renovate it, now attracts so many paying visitors that one needs to book or to check on line for a free space to chance turning up. That site requires a bus journey whereas Moore Street is right in the City Centre. There is a lot to attract visitors from other parts of Ireland and from abroad (who rate culture and history much higher than shopping in all surveys): a site where an actual battle took place, where the HQ of the Rising was relocated for two days, where 150 men and women fought the last days of a rising against the largest empire the world has seen and against the butchery of World War and where at last they surrendered. A street and lane-ways where civilians and Volunteers were shot down and where no less than five of the seven signatories of the Proclamation spent their last days of freedom.
Conserving and regenerating the Moore Street Quarter could also contribute to the regeneration of the north city centre as a whole, especially at night. Shopping centres might look busy in the day but at night they are wastelands.
I fully agree that the street should be leveled and regenerated.
Alas the State would have to pay compensation to the large number of illegal cigarette/tobacco vendors. Judging by the amount of sellers and the brisk trade they do, the compensation would run into the €millions.
The law is an ass:
It is hard to believe you can bury your head in the sand regarding the cigarette and tobacco sales that are costing the state and me the taxpayer billions over the years.
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