There's no harmony yet in the tap-tapping, bang-banging rhythms underscoring the lead-up to the St Patrick's festival. A few days' time and the city of Dublin will be dressed in its glad rags and ready to rock. Rude pigeons will make sensible personal protests over the air space of Spencer Dock, but over in Buckingham Street one man will have to think very seriously about his future.
His name is Terry Fagan and he's out of a job in three months' time, courtesy of Mary Harney's Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Strictly speaking, it's not their fault. His three-year project for the North Inner City Folklore Project has already been extended by six months. Although it stands as a template for local communities around the country and is, as intended, "socially useful", no one considers collecting memories useful enough to pay one committed man the princely sum of £160 a week after tax for any longer.
The man is gifted. Give him a different background and he'd be writing opinion pieces in the newspapers while chairing a history project for one of the universities and sitting on a rake of boards with hefty directors' fees. Dublin clings to him from the inside out, its past, its present, its uniquely local voices. But this Dublin isn't official enough to win serious status in the funding stakes: it's too vernacular.
His city is eye-level Dublin, human scale, human values, measured not by megabytes or Manhattan skylines but by what you see, hear and feel when you walk around. It's the shout in the street, the smells and sounds, the old voices whispering under the new talk.
Terry Fagan first started to collect and sift those elements when he went to work for meals-on-wheels some 25 years ago and all his customers plied him with chat and strong tea. He's spoken to hundreds of people, published several books, yet in June he'll be back in the dole queue, hearing stories no one will be able to share.
Fagan learned enough skills to win himself a good job with good money, if he's willing to take it: his wife is ill, and his commitment to his own community and their memories whole-hearted. The point of the Community Enterprise Scheme is to facilitate skill acquisition, with a view to moving participants on to "proper" jobs, and the State believes collecting oral history is not a proper job. So with the end of Terry's work go all those Dublin voices whose whispers may be the only chance of keeping the city sane.
Dublin likes to think of itself as a people's city. It certainly used to be, on Fagan's evidence. The place had its own humour, its own kind of banter, and a variety of front-parlour and backstreet cultures that screamed when they collided. The crush between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, was always tightest in the north inner city, from way before the time when trains and main thoroughfares spat hungry country people on to its streets as rapidly as they now spit out refugees.
More children under the age of five died from preventable diseases there than anywhere else in Europe; more young people die there now from the equally preventable plague called heroin. Those stereotypes burdened its people with negative images of their prospects.
Fagan collected voices that witness over one hundred years of Dublin's memories. Rituals of birth, death and living in between speak of bad and good times, but most of all about how a community could and did survive, often at terrible cost. This act of witnessing is the city's identity made flesh, speaking of itself in that idiomatic "Hiberno-English" whose patterns are the stuff transformed by writers from O'Casey, Joyce and Behan to young Turks like Roddy Doyle and Jimmy Murphy.
No one could invent the lines recorded from Mary Foran's Railway Street childhood in his new book Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle. Some local women didn't like a wellknown madam for parading her unfortunate girls on the street where the children were out playing. "One of the women that did not like what was going on was fighting with one of the madams. She was shouting up to the madam's house for her to come down and fight her: `Come down and I will read your pedigree, you old cow, ya'."
The pedigree Dublin is in the process of inventing for itself stands to forget the whispers. Better instead to focus on restored Georgian squares, architecturally-hot new buildings and an imaginary community of party-goers who work all day in e-commerce, then drink the rest of the night in specially patinated pubs where the seats have an antique look because someone took a scrubbing-brush to brand-new leather to make them that way.
Old prints are bought in by the dozen to create ambience, so that the culture tourists we're touting for can be assured they are here in the city that never sleeps. Heritage is, after all, something we think we can take for granted, precisely because there was always so much of it around. But not now, not at eye level in the streets where people live and work.
Some people may find it hard to believe that there are people like Terry Fagan who gauge their success by how well they serve their own community, rather than by how much it pays them. Certainly, the Department of Enterprise is not planning to encourage such social entrepreneurs by rewarding them extravagantly for their efforts, or mainstreaming their work into overall social policy.
Memory-banking is still so under-rated in the social and cultural economy that the Department of Arts, Culture, Gaeltacht and the Islands cannot get its head around the practice of oral history, in Dublin and elsewhere, while the Heritage Council is not even empowered to recognise that human memory, as expressed in this fluid form, actually exists.
Someday, someone will read between the lines of the misty-eyed tourist brochures that boast to the world about Dublin's fabulous human history, and realise that the memories which make Dublin itself - and not just one more place with hot buildings and a pounding pub culture - are fragile, like every other infrastructure. Ignore them, as we're doing, and they'll simply fade away.