A very tall drag queen dressed in platform shoes, a platinum wig and a tight silver lamé dress places a small neon sticker over my phone’s camera lens. “No pictures allowed,” she tells me. “We want everyone to feel like this is a safe space.”
I walk into the dark club. It’s 11:30 p.m., and the place is just starting to fill with all types of queer kids, straight kids, club kids. Intense strobe lights shroud the DJ in a sci-fi glow as pounding but melodic techno fills the room. People are focused on the music, undistracted, dancing alone or in groups. I’m sober, but for a moment, I forget where exactly I am. Covered in sweat and ready for bed, I stroll back outside, past the growing queue, the pulsing music now faint as I make the short walk back to Dublin’s city center down the quays of the River Liffey.
Grace is one of the city’s newest club nights, and it’s offering an original take on creating a safe space where people can enjoy themselves without the intrusion of technology. Managing the strict but fair door policy and helping set the tone for the event on the night is Mary Nally, founder and curator of Drop Everything, a cultural biennial that takes place on Inis Oirr off the west coast of Ireland that brings together the best in Irish and international art, music, food and design.
In the wake of a spate of club closures that gave way to new hotels and commercial properties that hurt the Dublin scene, making Grace, a monthly party, one of the most exciting things to happen in Ireland’s electronic music scene in a long time. The event was conceived by Caio Fabro and Stevie Nixx, who met while celebrating the results of the repeal referendum, which struck down the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution and allowed abortion rights. Fabro and Nixx quickly became friends and began to talk about the lack of a queer techno club in the nation’s capital. They wanted a club night for people like themselves and their friends, who were flying to Berlin every other month to find the nightlife and music they couldn’t get in their hometown.
It’s not the only new club that’s transforming Ireland’s nightlife culture. Inspired by the New York ball scene and the 2003 film Party Monster, Club Comfort, another inclusive club night, has become a haven for a diverse cross section of LGBTQ kids. The night started in the basement of a pub on Dublin’s Parnell Street and now throws its parties in the function room of the Commercial Rowing Club overlooking the river: When I talked with the club’s founders, Roo Honeychild, Cian Murphy and Jack Colley, I was struck by their optimism and belief that they could create anything they wanted in the city.
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Ireland has changed. The image of a twee and charming Ireland that is still being peddled by the country’s tourism bodies is passé. There is a vibrant, strange and successful scene growing in the country a scene that we no longer need to travel abroad to find.
As one of Ireland’s millennials, born in 1985, I was a child of the Celtic Tiger. When I was younger, I felt that I was born at just at the right time when it came to the country’s economic boom: I was young enough to experience the benefits of free third-level education, and I spent my college years earning more money than I ever made again, but I still wasn’t quite old enough to have availed myself of a 110 percent mortgage for an overpriced, poorly built home in the distant suburbs that would have left me in colossal negative equity to this day. At 19, I proudly told my mother that my friends and I would never leave Ireland. Why would we?
Come 2009, freshly armed with a postgraduate degree in journalism and debt from studying in London for a year, all that changed. The unprecedented economic growth that had taken Ireland from being a relatively poor country in Western European terms in the mid 1990s to one of the wealthiest by the 2000s halted, crashed and burned in the financial crisis of 2008.
Overnight, I decided to move to Hong Kong. There is something deeply ingrained in the Irish psyche it has a lot to do with being a post-colonial, island nation —but when things go wrong at home, we just up sticks and leave. Four of my grandmother’s sisters ended up on the West Coast of the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s, two of my mother’s sisters went to New York in the 1980s, and my own sister moved to New York in 2009 for nine years. She’s the only one who made it to America ever to return.
At the peak of Ireland’s recession in 2012, almost 1,000 people were emigrating every week. Most of my friends were leaving for London, Berlin, Sydney and Toronto. But others have come home, drawn home you might say, and they’ve brought with them a new international perspective based on their experience abroad. People started to trickle home in 2014, and those who had stayed behind seemed determined to make something of the place. Because of this, Ireland seems like a very different place since those days. For the past couple of years, when people have asked me how it is living back home, I’ve told them of this new energy that I’ve felt, that we’ve all felt.
It was a mobilized youth who realized they had a voice and power who helped once-conservative Catholic Ireland to become the first country in the world to vote for marriage equality, in 2015. And in 2018, we repealed the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution to allow women to have bodily autonomy for the first time in our nation’s history. After suffering from the banking crisis of 2008, the feeling that we could now affect change was undeniably empowering and energizing.
We’re in a new era of creative possibilities in Ireland. People no longer feel confined by the borders of our tiny island. With this has come a number of collectives, organizations and individuals doing extraordinary things.
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When countless young Irish were living far from home in 2012, a short film of a spoken word piece was posted on YouTube that resonated with many across the country. Written by Dave Tynan and performed by Emmet Kirwan, “Just Saying” is a poem that summed up the heartache of watching your friends leave home time and time again.
“I’m just saying, you might get sick of it all, but you might miss it too and there’s 10 good reasons to go but a 1,000 tiny ones not to, and I don’t know which is which anymore.”
In a country renowned for its writers and poets, “Just Saying” was an instant viral hit with hundreds of thousands of views, an expression of the rise in young Irish poets, spoken word artists and MCs who were giving a voice to social issues we had long kept quiet about.
Something else was going on: the first generation of young Afro-Irish kids who were born of a wave of mass immigration to Ireland during the boom times were coming of age. These kids, distinctly Irish but with a mixed heritage, were fusing their African roots to create a genre of Irish hip-hop and poetry that had never existed before. Over the past couple of years, Rejjie Snow, the Rusangano Family, Jafaris and other musicians have brought their sound to an international platform, drawing attention from, among other outlets, the New York Times and the Guardian.
A young wave of hip-hop collectives has also emerged, among them Slight Motif, a group of university students who came together to celebrate Ireland’s new urban culture through a quarterly magazine and related events. Others are releasing some of the freshest music the country has heard in years and are throwing some of the best parties. Soft Boy Records is a hip-hop label made up of friends in their early twenties who were recently the focus of a documentary on Boiler Room, the online music broadcasting platform.
“People give you shit about your accent,” says co-founder, producer and artist Kojaque, who adds, “I’m not doing it to spite the fact I’m Irish.”
“Everyone has this view of Ireland being backward and reversed.” vocalist and co-founder Kean Kavanagh says in the documentary. “But you need to take ownership of being Irish, and that’s what’s going to push it forward.”
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On Richmond Street, a row of dilapidated houses stands ready for demolition. It was in No. 7b that an assortment of creative enterprises first spread their wings in 2011. The two-story building with a shop on the ground floor had lain dormant for years when a group of friends asked the landlord if they could renovate and occupy it in return for housing squatters for free.
The group overhauled the building during lunch breaks from their jobs, for little or no money. The result was a sleek gray exterior; on the ground floor was Hang Tough Framing, a shop specializing in bespoke picture frames, and upstairs was the storeroom and studio for This Greedy Pig, an online culture publication and men’s streetwear clothing store.
The former residents have moved on from their home at 7b. Hang Tough Framing (and now Gallery) has a gorgeous, polished concrete-floored industrial space just around the corner on Lennox Street, a charming residential road. At the front of the building, the gallery hosts contemporary art exhibitions, while out back, the framing operation creates exceptional museum-quality frames for the country’s leading galleries and collectors.
Around the corner from Hang Tough, one of the country’s most renowned street artists, Maser, has opened Maser Atelier, a gallery space and hub for nurturing and exhibiting emerging artists’ work. Passersby on Charlemont Street can glimpse the artist at work on his huge, colorful canvases on what is an otherwise soulless thoroughfare.
This Greedy Pig, the other original 7b resident, has gone to market, and along with the original founders, Greg Spring and Russell Simmons and my current co-owners, it has been reborn as Hen’s Teeth, our creative studio that works with global brands to help connect them with culture, and our art and lifestyle store where we work with Irish and international artists to produce limited-edition prints and artworks.
For the past two years, we’ve operated our store and studio out of a beautiful but impractical five-story Victorian red-brick building on Dublin’s Fade Street. By the end of 2019, we will have moved to a 2,600 square foot open-plan building in an area called the Blackpitts, in the Dublin 8 neighborhood, where we will have a permanent gallery, lifestyle store, cafe and studio. We’re attempting to create a multi-faceted cultural space that has yet to exist in Ireland.
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As heady a time as this has been for the creative community, soaring rents in Dublin have forced a lot of people outside of the city. But this has inspired some to open businesses in their home counties.
Celebrating our belated Christmas party on a Thursday night in January, the Hen’s Teeth crew and I are seated around a table looking out at a damp, wintry street scene in the town of Ennistymon, near the west coast of County Clare.
“These beetroots were grown on a hill just down the road,” Niamh Fox, the chef/owner of Little Fox, tells us as we tuck into her delicious Ottolenghi-inspired salad. Fox is part of a growing wave of people using Ireland’s regional ingredients and fusing them with international flavors.
Ennistymon is an old market town that is attracting a new wave of life. Just down the road from Little Fox, an old pub was bought by Bodytonic, now one of the fastest-growing pub groups in the country. It hosts Sunday Sessions with leading guest chefs from around the country, serving delicious seasonal food.
The owners of the Fumbally, a cafe and events space in Dublin, have a property in Ennistymon, too. Sustainable architect Harrison Gardener designed their stables space. It’s a residential building for now, but it makes one think there will be more openings in this tiny town. Known for its simple, hearty sandwiches and salads, the Fumbally in Dublin has been a hotbed of young culinary talent since it opened in 2011.
Katie Sanderson is one of the celebrated chefs who emerged from the extended Fumbally crew. Born and raised in Hong Kong to Irish parents, she has enriched Asian Irish cuisine with White Mausu, her brand of condiments, particularly the mouthwatering Peanut Rayu, which has become a popular ingredient to add to many savory dishes.
Katie is not alone in mixing Irish ingredients and Asian cuisine in exciting ways. Hang Dai Chinese opened on Camden Street in Dublin in 2016 to great acclaim. Shrouded behind an anonymous black exterior, the restaurant looks like something out of Blade Runner. Mock Hong Kong metro booths are adorned with fake ads, and a hand-built custom sound system has a rotary mixer for late-night parties.
But it’s not simply about the cinematic atmosphere: the food is some of the best Chinese fare I’ve had outside of Hong Kong, using the best Irish ingredients and playing on the concept of “traditional” Irish Chinese take-out food. It’s all informed by the executive chef’s years of experience in Michelin-starred restaurants in France and Australia.
When we hosted Canadian chef Matty Matheson for a recent book signing, we took him to Assassination Custard, a tiny eatery in an old traditional cafeteria named after an infamous dessert that James Joyce and Nora Barnacle made for Samuel Beckett while he was in the hospital. Ken Doherty and Gwen McGrath, the couple who own the establishment, serve up delectable morsels using mostly vegetables from north county Dublin and fusing them with techniques they learned from time spent in North Africa and the Middle East.
While digging into sautéed cabbage, Matheson, who is recognized as one of the most famous chefs in the world, told the Irish Times journalist with us, “What’s crazy is there’s so many restaurants trying to do this kind of thing, but they don’t have the maturity to make something this simple actual home cooking but so good.”
The quality of our meats, dairy and vegetables is central to this exciting moment in Irish cuisine, but its growing appreciation is not limited to restaurants. Cork’s Neighbour Food operates out of an old warehouse. Customers order the local produce they want via the Neighbour Food app, and the orders are then circulated to dozens of producers and suppliers who come and place orders once a week in specially numbered boxes, ready for collection. By essentially cutting out the middleman of big supermarkets and allowing local food producers and farmers to get a bigger cut of their produce, the scheme has been a huge success and is now operating out of a second location in Cork and two spots in Dublin.
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As of this writing, roughly 20,000 people have signed a petition to save a Dublin bar’s beer garden. Once a rundown pub, the Bernard Shaw was taken over by Bodytonic in 2006.
The bar’s outdoor space is unique to the city: it’s a large, smoking-allowed garden with a pool table and a giant double-decker bus fitted out to serve pizzas, which backs onto a huge open lot that has hosted flea markets, gigs and even portable jacuzzis over the years. It was in this space that many young creatives got their first break, throwing parties and exhibitions and simply having space to talk through ideas.
The affordable-housing flats on the same block have been demolished to make room for offices and more upmarket accommodation. City officials say complaints have been made about noise from the Bernard Shaw, but noise levels haven’t changed in the 13 years the bar has occupied the space. The great increase in development in the area has led people to question why these noise complaints are arising only now. It seems like just another example of how the country’s newfound prosperity is again dampening cultural opportunities.
Dublin Digital Radio was founded by a group of friends in 2016, and it has provided a platform for emerging and established artists across Ireland to produce shows. Operating from a small studio in Jigsaw, a community space in Dublin’s North inner city, Dublin Digital Radio funds its activities by throwing parties in its space. It, too, is now searching for new offices.
Space is also at a premium with clubs like Hangar and District 8, knocked down and replaced by hotels. One large hospitality group seems determined to take over much of the vacant space in the city with its signature blend of derivative design and uninspired food while aping the independent businesses that have toiled to make the city interesting again. The fear is that another recession will hit, and we’ll be right back where we were in 2009, left with a city full of empty marble boxes with tarnished brass fittings and devoid of young, creative Dubliners ready to make their country a better place.
Contributor
Rosie Gogan-Keogh is a writer from Dublin who has published in the Irish Times, South China Morning Post, Asia Tatler and the Hollywood Reporter. She is the co-owner of Hen’s Teeth.
