Tree that symbolises agonising rebirth of an era

JUST a few hundred yards from the thronged shops in Dublin city centre, where a huge Christmas tree presides over an endless parade of purchases, there is another Christmas tree. It stands on the traffic island at the junction of Buckingham Street and Killarney Street, where the junkies used to wait for their dealers.

It has lights, but they have to compete with the glow of the fire that warms the hard men that watch over it. It has stars, 69 of them, each one marking a heroin death, a local life snuffed out by AIDS or overdose. Underneath it there are gifts, messages and cards that have been accumulating over the days of Advent, naming and remembering the loved ones who have been carried off by the plague.

There is nothing more moving, or more sobering, than finding that hackneyed, sentimental symbols have suddenly taken on a real meaning. However banal we have made it, we know that Christmas draws from deep wellsprings of fear and hope.

In the darkest days of the year, there is a desire to mark the fact that the gloom is beginning, however imperceptibly, to diminish. In the images of a new child and a new era that Christianity added to that eternal emotion, there are promises of regeneration. But those meanings have been buried beneath impenetrable layers of banal jolliness. It has taken one of the most troubled and oppressed communities, in Ireland to unearth them again.

Beside the tree in Buckingham Street, in the Fire Station artists' studios, there is a remarkable series of 30 paintings by a local artist, Tony Crosbie, charting his own descent into the hell of addiction and painful re-emergence into the world.

Tony Crosbie started to paint three years ago when he was recovering from addiction to drink and drugs. His paintings are not about recovery, they are a recovery, a facing of facts about his own life. The journey they map is a road to Golgotha, a road littered with death and shame, with savagery and self-loathing.

The images they bear are full of horror and grief: sexual abuse and domestic violence in childhood, imprisonment and torment, the attractions of suicide. In vivid and violent colours, they delineate the inner reality that has been reflected on the streets outside. They betray no trace of self-pity, but are full of remorse, of determination and of courage.

Outside on the street, the Christmas tree is prettier and more gentle, but it has the same fierce sense of facing up to the recent past. It articulates a double sense of the verb "to own".

In one sense, it is an act of owning up, of accepting publicly that the junkies and the AIDS victims are part of the community, that the people who live there have to face what has happened to them in the last decade. And in the other sense it is about taking ownership of both the place itself and the stories that have remained, through shame and anger, untold.

The collective effort to rid the area of drug-pushers started with the telling of stories, with people being willing to stand up at public meetings and talk about what had happened in their families, what they had been seeing and living with for years.

Mick Rafferty, who originally approached Dublin Corporation about getting the tree erected, sees it as the next stage, putting names to the stories, identifying the anonymous grief that has hung over the area for so long.

Symbols work, of course, only if they are images of something real. The tree in Buckingham Street is part of what has been going on in the north inner city and in other areas of Dublin all year.

One local woman, Geraldine O'Toole, told me that she used to polish the brasses on her front door at half past six in the morning so that she wouldn't have to see the junkies queueing for a fix. Only by hiding away, by trying not to look, by doing all she could to clear the used syringes from the paths that her children had to walk, was it possible to remain sane.

And then slowly another possibility of sanity presented itself, a public and collective rather than a private and hidden one. It was the possibility of reclaiming the streets and the stairwells.

BECAUSE it has been real, the anti-drugs movement in working-class estates in Dublin this year has been complex, ambiguous and often cruel. Rooted as it is in desperate communities, it has embraced both the worst and the best of what those communities contain.

It has included riots, threats and opportunities for dark forces to present themselves as defenders of the people. But at its core it has been one of the most remarkable expressions of civic responsibility that this State has seen.

Across the road from the Buckingham Street Christmas tree, for instance, there is a house in which local parents give primary school children a place to go after school, to do homework, to play, to be safe. Round the corner in Amiens Street, there is a brilliant project in which 12 women on methadone maintenance are reconstructing their lives through education, knowledge and self-confidence gradually taking the place of narcotic stupor.

Cathleen O'Neill, one of the women who run the project, talks about the Christmas tree as a kind of epiphany, Epiphany being, of course, the feast of the Magi who brought gifts to the newborn infant. She sees the tree as an offering of the only thing the community really has: "It's little enough people here have but their public expression of grief.

Her words reminded me of T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi. "I had seen birth and death,/But had thought they were different; this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death." The tree is a tree of death, a memorial for wasted lives. But it is also a symbol of the bitterly agonising rebirth of a community that has passed through nightmares and is shaking itself awake.

Carrying my own Christmas tree home the other day, I couldn't help thinking that its meaning has been altered and deepened by the one in Buckingham Street. That tree suggests that the hackneyed symbols that decorate cards and shop windows can be brought back in touch with real lives.

It suggests that Christmas can be more than mindless indulgence, that we can still find a meaning in the idea of a turning point where the darkest of days begins to accommodate some light. And if the people of an area that has known darker days than most can make that turn, the least the rest of us can do is acknowledge their courage by facing, even for a while, in their direction.