Dublin flea markets: Beyond the bric-a-brac

When starting this article, I had planned to reference the Robert Pinsky poem ‘Antique’, explore the human desire to nest in our conspicuous consumption tchotchkes and relics, finagle a pithy reference to the German Kunstkammer; maybe throw in a bit of Marie-Antoinette Syndrome as food for thought — you know, a real Trinner Article written by your proverbial studying abroad American manic pixie dream girl. But because this is Dublin and we’re going through an existential housing crisis with city development progressing at exponential speeds, I cannot have my cake and eat it too. This, instead, is a story of the soul of a city: opposing teams of tourists, hotels and tech companies on one side and locals, artists, and hawkers on the other. It’s a familiar tale. 

As Hemingway put it, “Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars,” and in the back room of Lucky’s Bar on Meath Street, a craft brewery is trying to keep its city’s culture alive. Two doors down from Liberty Market, one of Dublin’s longest running flea markets, an oasis of bargains and low overhead, lies Artfully Market, a project of Hopfully Brewing Co. which is just over a year old. The market revolves around art and craftware, featuring live music, food, workshops, even lotteries of homemade scratch tickets. “We used to brew beer in our backyard of our house with our group of friends who are artists who join us to do live graffiti, live painting, jam sessions. We wanted to bring this to a wider audience,” says Vilson de Mello Jr., who goes by Junior, co-founder of the brewery. The spirit of this flea market is opportunity. Young up-and-coming artists fresh from graduation or new to the Dublin art scene use the market to sell their work and network. The artists gather experience by designing the event’s promotional material, and new artists are rotated so that every market is composed of around 80% new vendors. It is also important for Junior that the market is accessible for all customers, so they intentionally keep workshop prices reasonable. All vendors commented on the ethos of this flea as democratizing. 

Partnership between street traders and breweries is hardly new in Dublin. The Iveagh Market in The Liberties was built in part by the Guiness family in 1906 on the site of the former Sweetman’s Brewery to give the street vendors of Dublin a dry place to sell their goods. This market, the hawkers going back generations in their profession, was operational until the 1990s. Now, this architectural specimen, whose facade is lined with carved faces representing the parts of the world their wares originated from, sits abandoned and derelict. Dublin Council retains ownership and reports it requires at least €13 million for basic repair they are apparently unwilling to spend. Next-door however, The Little Iveagh Market is a new attempt to bring back market culture to Dublin’s old Antique Quarter. 

Housed in the Drop Dead Twice pub, the Little Iveagh had its first market last Sunday. Andrew Mulhall, who helped run the Dublin Flea two years back, began this project as a testament to the local culture of Dublin 8, and a rebellion against incoming development and gentrification: “I think the biggest thing we regret in the end is you only miss things when they’re gone. And it’s literally going very quickly. And then we’ll miss it. And then we go ‘why didn’t we do something about it?’ You take a lot for granted,” says Mulhal.

Many of the less historic markets developed from the economic hardship of the 2008 recession. As Mulhall puts it, “Markets strive in recession because people have to be creative. They go to their creative side and then it’s forgotten about when they get Google jobs and facejobs, and hashtag ‘big-corporation jobs’ and then they don’t need to be creative anymore.” A silver lining of financial crashes is the low rent and freed space for independent artists, club venues, and general counter-culture businesses to thrive in. But now with swift economic growth, the current issue is a complete lack of infrastructure or planning to continue the businesses formed by the thrifty creatives of a decade previous.

The issue of tourism and its corresponding hotels has been a huge factor in pushing markets out of established areas. Fáilte Ireland in its 2017 research on Travel Profiles reported that Ireland has almost two overseas tourists for every resident. While Dublin residents compete with tourists for affordable housing, small independent businesses fostered by flea markets compete for space to exist with companies offering amenities to those tourists. It’s no surprise who wins. 

“The irony is … they see a place becoming cool and arty as huge social capital and so it gentrifies around that… And then ironically it turns around and shuts down a lot of those spaces that were what originally made it profitable and what made it a valuable, cool place to live,” observes Clara Dudley. Originally from San Francisco, she sees the echoing pattern of the developer market. Many tourists coming in aren’t that well-versed in the local city issues of gentrification and housing, and many traders put the onus on the Dublin City Council. “I think whoever’s on committees, tourists are more important at the moment than actual people. That’ll have a kickback affect in a few years because people do come to Dublin and Ireland in general for the culture — it’s not all Guinness, Aran Jumpers, and sheep, there’s also an inner-city culture that’s ancient that needs to be respected,” says Andrew Mulhall. 

The summer of 2018 was a veritable market massacre: seven weekend markets shuttered their stalls for the final time. Dublin Flea recently announced the closure of their long-standing Christmas Market. The most alarming to the market scene however, is the closure of The Dublin Flea itself. A longstanding establishment of the craft/food/antique/vintage/music experiential pluralism of modern markets and the largest in the city, to many sellers this is the real dead canary in the coal mine of their business culture. Lucy Bordot, an embroidery artist at Artfully Market says “It’s good that in the last month or so I’ve seen a movement [of] a lot of new markets opening, which is really good for us, but Dublin Flea is the one that everyone knows… it’s been there for ten years so it is a big loss because now, people don’t know where to go if they want to buy crafts or that sort of stuff. It gives an opportunity for new places but it’s an institution.”

The developments which are threatening spaces like flea markets —  be it hotels, luxury student apartments, or big tech companies — are not offering a coup de grâce; market culture is not in need of a lease-bound mercy killing. The demographic is there, enthusiastic, varied, “very broad”: “I was reaching out to creative circles, like from NCAD, but I think there’s a lot of people who used to always come to the markets, so there’s definitely an older crowd too. It’s very mixed,” artist and vendor Holli Gilson described. “Earlier there was [sic] a lot of dogs also. If you want to add that in — we’re puppy friendly!” At both markets the atmosphere is young and animated. With colorful shifting lighting and charged music, it feels like the smoking area of an underground club, except participants are wielding prints, stickers and homemade preserves instead of cigarettes. These flea markets are not only alive and viable, but vibrant and in demand. 

In less poetic terms, they are financially viable enterprises. Hopfully Brewing has enjoyed much success with their market. The artists, who come and sell with no attached stall fee, also partner to design their beer labels, with their signature on the can. The Christmas Market reportedly brought in €3 million, 600 vendor submissions, and 73,000 visitors, which one vendor described to me as packed shoulder-to-shoulder. When mentioning e-commerce as an option, every vendor preferred the makeshift brick and mortar markets. “I’m about to reopen my etsy shop and I’m going to have to raise my fees. Because there’s so much labor that goes into e-commerce. And there’s so many fees from etsy and everybody that it has to be higher” said print artist Clara Dudley. Etsy, DePop and other online avenues can actually be more expensive for the customer and less cost-effective for the trader. For Lucy Bordot, markets were essential for elevating her embroidery business: “You can only go so far with the internet. I think this is what really showcases our work to the community and to the people who actually like the stuff that we do.” After her first day selling at the Little Iveagh, Holli Gilson reflects, “If there’s anything I’ve learned today it’s that there’s definitely a market for markets. It’s more a case of being able to hold it. So hopefully this’ll be an ongoing thing and will continue to grow. But obviously we won’t have that much space for it to grow. There’s more interest than we’ve got room for.”

I sit on the steps of the old abandoned Iveagh Flea market interviewing Holli and Andrew. As we begin to talk in hopeful terms, “onwards and upwards,” “positive vibes today,” etc., a Dublin City Council street cleaner comes along, drowning out all conversation. Laughing at the almost satiric levels of irony, Holli shouts above the din “well, at least they’re doing something!” Followed by an earnest “thank you” in the same tone of voice she used earlier to describe the canine customers. Andrew laughs along but doesn’t put sole responsibility on the Council. “People also need to blame themselves… The council are basically being allowed to do it, which is our fault as well.” He finds the lack of protest almost as dismaying as the changes themselves. 

“You have to shout sometimes. Don’t know if they listen but at least you’re shouting, at least you’re doing something. And our little shout here today is what we’re doing here. You know that orange thing,” Mulhall gestures to a tent with empty chairs outside the pub. “There’s nobody underneath it, but it’s showing that there’s a market here. And it’s in the Market quarter in Dublin. I think it’s important to do.”

The issue of art, culture, and real estate in Dublin isn’t limited to, but exemplified by the issue of the city’s flea markets. But Mulhall, as one of the newest on the scene, echoes the playwright whose eponymous pub, The Bernard Shaw, is another upsetting notch on the bedpost of development: “Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of time.”