Speaking notes at a Reception for St Teresa’s Gardens,
Áras an Uachtaráin, 26th February 2014
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Áras an Uachtaráin this afternoon. I would like to congratulate all of you for having achieved, collectively, such a compelling realisation as Come into the Gardens.
Your film powerfully conveys the sense of a space made communal as it was invested with intimacies and shared by the residents of St Teresa’s Gardens – the solidarity between neighbours, the joyous presence of children, recalled in the colourful stories and memories of the older residents.
As Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots :
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”.
Indeed place-making, a sense of place, of home, of neighbourhood, is critical to our living together.
Your film also very strikingly illustrates the ability of the Gardens’ residents to appreciate and derive enjoyment from the patches of nature that persist, survive and thrive in the margins of the urban environment; it shows how, by implanting their own sensibilities and imagination, the residents have found beauty in their environment.
Some of the scenes conjured up by the film’s narrators will stay with us as powerful images from the senses and the spirit – a blanket thrown on the grass for a picnic; the variety of flowers, tulips, daffodils, sunflowers, that might be grown on the site; or the different fish living in the pond.
Come into the Gardens does not, however, give us any false rosy, or romanticised, picture of life in the Gardens’ blocks. In its own nuanced and sensitive fashion, it tells of the arrival of drugs in the area, of the source and content of gang violence, and the slow decrepitude of the flats, all circumstances that made daily life so challenging for many of you.
The film also reminds us that the flush of money which swept our island during the Celtic Tiger era was very unequally distributed. It was not deployed in a way that allowed for a genuine reduction of social inequalities. St. Teresa’s Gardens stand as a place and a community that missed out on the opportunities for large scale regeneration that existed and might have happened. Then too, de-tenanting occurred in such a way that the remaining tenants were sometimes left as the sole surviving residents on an otherwise deserted balcony, living in what they describe as “a ghost town.”
It is truly impressive, therefore, that you have managed to give such testimony, transforming your sense of loss in the face of the Gardens’ decline into the creation of something new. It is impressive that you were able to draw on the sense of community which animates you to imagine and give shape to a collective artistic endeavour.
Today St Teresa’s Gardens as we have known them for the last 60 years are about to disappear forever. Demolition has already started, and the site is going to be changed thoroughly in both its material and social make-up. But with this film, you have created a new place of memory; a work of art that will endure.
One of the protagonists in the film says, “there is only one way in and one way out of St Teresa’s Gardens.” Well, Come into the Gardens opened up the site to the gaze of the spectators at the Jameson International Film Festival, and to the many others who will view the film in the future; it invites all of us to share an appreciation of the Gardens’ hidden treasures, an appreciation of why – as another voice in the film puts it – you can be “proud of being from the flats, and proud of being from Dublin 8!”
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.