Radical Walk : Comprador State, Phibsborough to Cabra

Space in Dublin for radical talks and workshops is hard to find these days. As a way of getting around that I’ve started doing radical walks. These are not walking tours, a stroll of passive observations. The idea behind a radical walk is to use the streets to highlight ideas and discussion outside of the norm.

The concept is not new. Radicals have been using the streets as a pedagogical space for hundreds of years. The intensive commodification of space in Dublin; the shutting down of social spaces; the evictions and for sale signs on empty buildings – all of these have added to the impetus to return to the streets for education and ideas.

I designed recently a radical walk for Daylight Glasnevin, a new social space on the northside of the city. The route was along the Royal Canal. Its main focus was the dynamic of class relations in the Irish state, and it covered topics such as social housing speculation from the 1880s to today; the rise of the comprador class; trade unions in the Free State; agrarian secret societies; and feminist, Chartist, socialist and Marxist writings from the 1780s onwards.

The stops along the route were not typical ‘walking tour’ type locations – there were no great historical buildings to point to and tell the story for us.

But that’s completely fine, as the idea is to make the stops engaging and interactive enough so that a proper dialogue and discussion take place.

And the stops I did treat as akin to slides in a talk. These are the seven I eventually settled on. They differ slightly from map as I was refining the walk pretty much up until the day of it.

A good crowd showed up on the day – around fifty people or so. There was good discussion, a lot of questions, some debate and an exchange of ideas, experiences, and insights. Photos below are by Augustine O’Donoghue.