My subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand, let yea,
on the word of Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the Golden City
which is to be the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.

One evening in the summer of 1998, I was standing on the doorstep having a conversation with my elderly neighbour, Kathleen. She described how her granddaughter, the first in five generations, could not afford to live in the area where she was born. The location, one of the oldest neighbourhoods on the north side of Dublin was experiencing the initial stages of a process, marking the urban evolution and impact of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the Irish Republic, a period since characterised in the description of the appearance of countless cranes elevated across the city skyline.

Over the following month, in response to that conversation, I, somewhat instinctively, began to make portraits of children and young people in the area. Possessing no front gardens, the street was the primary setting to gather, converse and play. So, at first, I approached those people I knew, made a request and then photographed each—always eye level, gaze directed towards the lens—as they presented themselves to the camera. The timing was at dusk and always with cranes in the background. An impulsive reaction using photography to ask questions about the economic circumstance, and who benefits? And mindful of the significance of the age of those portrayed – critically, whose future?

That September, I returned to college as a mature student to study photography, not then realising that this was really the beginning of a cycle of research projects, which thematically addressed the predatory context, resulting from flows and migrations of global capital, that continues to the present day. As the Irish poet Theo Dorgan would later state of this time: ‘I was born in a Republic to realise that I live in an Economy’.

1.From James Joyce’s Ulysses, as quoted by the then Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Charles Haughey at the launch of the Custom Docks Redevelopment in Dublin, the future location of the International Financial and Services Centre (IFSC) in June 1987. 

2. In the early 1990s, the American investment bank, Morgan Stanley, first described the Irish economy as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ (O’Hearn, 1998: 6) – a title inspired by the country’s economic performance in comparison to the ‘Tiger’ economies of South East Asia..