Fintan O’Toole: Dublin portal reminds us that our capital has an uneasy edge of wildness

The erection of the portal linking night-time inner city Dublin to daytime New York was a heroic act of denialPeople view the live-stream portal between Dublin and New York, which attracted 'inappropriate behaviour' that really should not have surprised anyone.

Is it appalling that people would stand in front of the portal and flash their naked bits at innocent passersby on the piazza in front of the Flatiron building? Is it disgusting that some creeps put up pornographic images on their phones and that others thought it amusing to taunt New Yorkers with pictures of the 9/11 atrocity? Appalling, disgusting – yes.

I’m from Dublin. It’s my home city and I love it. But I don’t remember a time when the city did not have an uneasy edge of wildness. It is not, by the standards of big cities around the world, especially violent. But it is unruly. Nor is it a coincidence that the last Magdalene laundry, closed only in 1996, was near to where the portal was erected. The methods of social control used to put manners on women were so brutal that they ultimately discredited the moral authorities that imposed them.

The erection of the portal linking night-time inner city Dublin to daytime New York was, in this light, a heroic act of denial. The idea of But looking away becomes impossible when someone else is looking at us. The obnoxious antics that led to the closure of the portal can be seen any night on the streets, the bus, the Luas. Yet they acquire a kind of invisibility: the city flows around them as if they are not there. It is only the outside gaze that turns them into an intolerable embarrassment.

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