Loving Crumlin: ode to a shopping centre

‘At a meeting held here this evening, it was decided the Crumlin Shopping Centre will impose strict economic sanctions on Turkey, following the downing of a Russian fighter jet several days ago, in Turkish airspace.”

It has been a busy week at Crumlin Shopping Centre. In tandem with its sanctions against Turkey – a bummer at this poultry-obsessed time of year, one would think – the Christmas decorations have gone up.

“A big thank you to the staff who put up this absolutely stunning Yuletide display. I’ve always felt that it’s not really Christmas, until the Crumlin Shopping Centre has its decorations up. Also, make sure you’re here tonight at 6pm, as we have a very special guest switching on the lights on our Christmas tree!”

News of the sanctions and decorations came as posts on Official Crumlin Shopping Centre, a decidedly unofficial Facebook page created and curated by one man. It’s a satirical site filled with irreverent humour, low-grade graphics and the odd exorcism photograph. Started in February, it now has fans all over the world.

A post on it the next day said: “Obviously, you all know by now that Garth Brooks was the special guest last night.” He wasn’t. “He was only booked to switch on the Christmas lights, so when he tried to sing one of his awful songs, I just lost it and punched him in the eye. I’d like to apologise unreservedly for my behaviour. I’d also like to thank the thousands of you who turned up to see our magnificent Christmas tree lights being switched on.”

A poster with a Cyrillic name was also annoyed: “I’m really upset by all of this. Jedward were booked to perform and had travelled all the way from their last gig in Korea to be there on time. If there was a change in schedule, the least you could’ve done was inform their management.”

Meet the manager

It is 5.30pm. It is dark. It is drizzling outside Crumlin Shopping Centre. No one is in Texas Fried Chicken yet, but it will soon fill up as people come in for their dinner.

The man behind the website is waiting for The Irish Times. Online he styles himself as “The Manager of the Official Crumlin Shopping Centre page on Facebook”. We’ll just call him the Manager.

He is, of course, not the manager of the centre. He has nothing to do with the place, he clarifies. He is anonymous online, a sort of Crumlin Banksy. He will never show his face in a way that could be associated with the site, he says.

More than 20,000 people now follow Official Crumlin Shopping Centre on Facebook, he says, rather embarrassed by the site’s strict adherence to what he considers “shoddy graphics done on a phone that encapsulate the spirit of the site perfectly”.

And this from a man who studied graphic design. Although he says he was rubbish at it.

Not everyone is aware of the site, though. Only yesterday the Manager was talking to a cousin who had never heard of it.

She is part of a dwindling band of the uninitiated, however. Thanks to emigration the website quickly went global. The page has followers in Australia, Canada and the US, the Manager says.

“I think it’s the nostalgia that brings them back to their youth, because I suppose that everyone went to the Crumlin Shopping Centre at some stage, didn’t they?”

We posit that the Manager might be overly optimistic that hordes of south Dubliners flocked to Crumlin Shopping Centre in its heyday. Didn’t the great unwashed of Blackrock head to the Frascati Shopping Centre for their kicks, chorizo and Chianti?

The Manager is having none of it. Apart from Crumlin, the rest of the retail world is dead to him.

Going viral

“The first day that I started it, it kicked off,” the Manager says, “and basically it was a bit controversial.”

So how did it begin? “I had got a post on Facebook from a friend who had gone to Canada and was sharing some less attractive shots of her locale. I said, ‘If you think that’s bad, look at this,’ and put up a picture of the Crumlin Shopping Centre.

“I just set up a page for the craic, and as the night wore on people started to cop on and realise it was a joke. They looked at the first two posts and then the third, and it went from people finding it funny to people getting really angry and threatening me and trying to get my page shut down.

“And then it went mad,” he says. “People who had got the joke started slagging off the people who had taken it seriously.”

The Manager had posted a photograph of an elderly woman, said that she had been found in the drapery section, and asked anybody who knew her to get in contact. “I was very careful about how I worded it,” he says. And he sourced an authorised agency photograph, he says. “It got shared over 2,000 times. It reached more that 250,000 people.”

The Manager has also featured a spoof exorcism in the fruit-and-veg section.

Never shy of a bit of controversy – posts have included Roy Keane, Denis O’Brien and those waging jihad – the Official Crumlin Shopping Centre page tackles all comers with the same irreverent humour. By contrast, he avoids criticising people who are vulnerable. “You always think, Who is the butt of this joke? I don’t want to be knocking minorities or the weakest people in society. I am very aware how that might come across, so I don’t want to be offensive. The funniest thing is when you’re attacking the most powerful people.

“I try not to have anything too negative about Crumlin or too derogatory about Crumlin or working-class areas in general.”

All you need is love

The Facebook page, which has been imitated by at least four other Irish shopping-centre sites, is based on love, the Manager points out.

He was motivated partly by annoyance at negative portrayals of his home turf. “When people think about Crumlin they think about drugs or violence. When they think of Crumlin I want people to think of the shopping centre. I don’t want them thinking of shootings and stabbings.”

The Manager has a soft spot for the shopping centre. “I had joked about it while I was growing up, but now I have started the page it has grown on me, and I feel a little bit protective. When we were growing up it had everything in it. It had a bank, jewellery stores, a hairdresser, Golden Discs, a Bank of Ireland. A lot of my friends have their own memories of the place.”

What would he do if they changed Crumlin Shopping Centre? “I’d be really worried, because a lot of the humour comes from the fact that it’s run-down and the juxtaposition of that and how grandly I talk about it. So if it got knocked down and they revamped it into a nice shopping centre we’d lose a lot of the humour.

“I think the first thing you’ll be struck by, when entering the Crumlin Shopping Centre, is the pungent sense of history,” he says. “We’ve been a huge part of this community for a long time. People may say we haven’t changed much over the years, but I like to see that as reliable consistency.

“While the world outside seems to shift and distort like some bad drug trip, Crumlin Shopping Centre remains as constant as the North Star. Outside Dublin 12, Crumlin Shopping Centre has been integral in some of the most pivotal moments in this country’s history, most recently in being the first shopping centre to call for a Yes vote in the marriage referendum.”

The second thing you’ll notice, he says, is “the friendliness and dedication of our staff. Whether they are wading waist deep into the Grand Canal to retrieve a trolley for you, or diligently working through their hangovers to help you have the best shopping experience, they’ll never let the veneer of politeness slip.”

The third and final thing you’ll find in the centre, he says, is that “even though we only have five outlets, they have everything you’ll ever need. Whether it’s prescription pain killers in Hickey’s pharmacy, your weekly shop at competitive prices in Dunnes or Tesco, or fine dining for the whole family in Texas Fried Chicken, it’s all here at the Crumlin Shopping Centre.”

You don’t get that in Dundrum, he says.

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