My day on McGregor’s mean streets
As an American journalist portrays Crumlin as a gun-toting ghetto, we sent our brave writer to get to the bottom of what happens in the UFC star’s ‘hood’
There’s no hail of bullets on Crumlin Road ‘I say, let them fight between themselves’
WALKING down the dimlylit pathway, I keep close to the railings and clutch my handbag tightly to me. A four-wheel drive parks up at the local Centra. It’s a flashy and jazzed-up black car, very Love/Hate. An idle thought grows quickly and grips me: am I about to encounter a feared drug lord first-hand? Phew, no, it’s just a suburban mum, ferrying a clatter of kids to the weekly shop.
A shadow falls across my path from behind a tree just ahead. Terrified, I look around in desperation, trying to find someone to help me should this be a violent mugger. Thankfully, it’s just a young boy boisterously running to retrieve his football after his friend kicked it wide of their makeshift goalpost.
What about this vehicle, slowing down behind me until it matches the speed of my cautious footsteps. Am I about to be the innocent victim of a gory drive-by shooting? Again, I can relax, it’s just the No.151 bus releasing its glut of passengers on their way home from an afternoon’s shopping. It’s not a recent glut of horror films that have me so on edge. No, it’s an article released last week by American sports channel ESPN. When writer Wright Thompson filed a piece from Dublin 12 about the rise and rise of Conor McGregor, he depicted a Crumlin — and its adjacent ‘project’, Drimnagh — that many of its longtime inhabitants barely recognise.
Drug dealers on street corners. An area where crossing into the wrong street is ‘reason enough for an asswhipping’. A ‘clannish, parochial place’. A neighbourhood where ‘men have had to drop dates off at bus stops instead of walking them all the way home’. Evidently, Thompson wasn’t letting the reality — that it is in fact possible to cross Crumlin Road without meeting a hail of bullets — get in the way of a good yarn.
In fact, in the afternoon sunshine, that reality is very, very different. I’d go so far as to say this is a very normal corner of Dublin.
Elderly people amble along the footpath, mums push buggies laden down with shopping, young men in hi-vis vests make haste to the chipper for sustenance after finishing a day’s work. Around the Four Roads pub, overlooking the vast green expanse of Eamonn Ceannt park, there’s the usual early evening beery merriment, just as there is in most places in Dublin. The Gaza Strip, it very much ain’t. When the article was published earlier this week, the dubious reactions that called out Wright’s portrait of Crumlin — evocative and well written though it was — came thick and fast.
Matt Cooper wandered into the fray, tweeting bluntly, ‘what sort of c**p is this?’ Author Dave Hannigan also added to the chorus: ‘Any word of the United Nations announcement about sending peacekeepers into Crumlin Road to separate the warring factions of troubled Dublin?’ he tweeted.
Now, the less said about foreign journalists resorting to embellishing tropes about Ireland, the better. Remember when an online article described Leo Varadkar as growing up in an Ireland featuring ‘thatched cottages drenched in drizzle and church steeples shrouded in mist’, later revised online due to widespread criticism? The people of Castleknock are probably still looking for that drenched thatched cottage.
In any case, Thompson — a venerable sports writer by anyone’s yardstick — opted for something of a similar tack, and went full-blown Hollywood.
Perhaps overlooking the fact that McGregor had been living with his parents in a four-bedroom house in the leafy Laraghcon estate in Lucan before he joined the UFC, Thompson set about painting the formative years of the scrappy fighter as happening against a backdrop of drugs, crime, violence and danger.
All of which comes as a bit of a surprise to Robert ‘Lester’ Dowling, a street sweeper who has lived in Crumlin for 44 years.
‘It’s nothing like that,’ he says. ‘I walk down to work in the Liberties to sweep the roads, and it’s worse there.’
So he has never seen the gangland activity that Thompson says ‘read like a Dennis Lehane novel, day after day’?
‘I say let them fight between themselves, but you don’t see it,’ he shrugs.
A blonde woman whizzes past, overhearing our conversation. ‘It’s a kip!’ she shouts decisively, without stopping. ‘An absolute s***ehole.’
Perhaps it’s fairer to say that some locals have a love-hate relationship with Crumlin — as opposed to, well, a Love/Hate one.
With a name that translates from Irish (Croimghlinn) to ‘Crooked Glen’, Crumlin Village developed as an Anglo-Norman settlement soon after the Norman conquest in 1170. It has survived through the centuries and shapeshifted into a vast, multicultural area. Professionals and young families have moved into Dublin 12, and there’s no shortage of For Sale signs pockmarking the houses in the area.
McGregor isn’t the area’s only famous son, either: in fact, the locality boasts an illustrious roll-call of denizens, past and present. Brendan Behan moved from the city centre to Crumlin, while painter and poet Christy Browne, actor Gabriel Byrne and footballer Andy Reid were all born there. Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, football star Paul McGrath and singer/songwriter Paddy Casey were also Crumlin natives.
Noel Kelly, born and reared on Captain’s Road, has little time for portrayals of Crumlin as ceaselessly violent or dangerous.
‘It’s b ****** s,’ he states. ‘Crumlin always had a bad name for as long as I’ve been around. Nothing happens around here anyway as far as I know. I couldn’t elaborate because I don’t know.’
He acknowledges that the area isn’t entirely without violence but, says Kelly, most Crumlin inhabitants don’t appear to be privy to it.
‘Let them get on with it,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. Once it doesn’t come my way I don’t care what they do. You hear it every day of the week on television, but if you were going to be afraid you might as well stay at home. You’d have more freedom up in the Joy [Mountjoy Prison] than down here if you were involved in that s***e.’
Yet Thompson is not completely wrong with his portrayal. His observation of Crumlin as a clannish, parochial place isn’t too wide of the mark. The fact remains: it’s a closely knit area where people look out for each other, and neighbours treat each other like family.
‘It’s very tight,’ explains Kelly. ‘If people see something, they’ll ring the police. Sure, there’s a Neighbourhood Watch here.’
‘Everyone moves out, but moves back to Crumlin eventually,’ adds Lena Conlon, also from Captain’s Road.
Where I came from was lovely, but
many of the older neighbours have died off, so it’s changed a bit.’
For all the backlash to Thompson’s ESPN piece, it’s fair to say that it’s not all hyperbole. Crumlin is spirited, earthy and close-knit, but it has connotations with gangland activity for a reason.
The Hutch-Kinahan feud has loomed over the city for years, and many of the Kinahan faction, with ties to the south city, have become its casualties. David Byrne, who was killed in the now infamous Regency Hotel shooting, was born and bred in Crumlin.
The Crumlin/Drimnagh war, which has raged on for years, has claimed scores of lives of smalltime criminals, with gang leader Brian Rattigan currently serving life for murder. And of course, Martin Cahill, one of Ireland’s best-known underworld figures, was once a native of Crumlin.
McGregor even addressed Crumlin’s gangland reputation directly in Thompson’s ESPN piece: ‘I still am in Crumlin every day... There’s still s***,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘Now there’s cartels.’
McGregor revealed in the piece that he never got dragged into a criminal lifestyle, despite living close to it. There was an instance, reportedly, where he got into a brawl with Johno Frazer, the brother of a high-profile gangland target. Former dealer Frazer gave Thompson a tour of the bullet holes marking the front wall of his Drimnagh home.
‘Johno Frazer stood in front of his house, which he inherited from his recently deceased mother,’ Thompson wrote. ‘This was the same place once attacked with a grenade. A crease marked the door, and the splintered glass of a bullet hole remained in the window above it. Johno wore scars on both sides of his neck, a permanent reminder of a prison murder attempt. He stepped out into the street and described his fight with McGregor... “He was afraid I’d stab him”.’
But living so close by, Frazer and McGregor eventually became friends, and even went on holiday to Greece together.
‘We were all drug dealers, and we all had loads of money,’ Frazer told Thompson. ‘Conor had none. Conor stayed in our room on a blow-up bed. His dad was ringing him, “He has to come home, go back to plumbing”.’
Lena Conlon acknowledges that things have changed on the streets where she grew up.
‘There’s a lot more trouble than there was years ago,’ she says. ‘Growing up, there was nothing like that, not shootings. And now it’s stabbings. But it’s only what you read in the paper. You wouldn’t see anything.’
She admits, too, that there are more armed gardaí visible on the streets as they try to combat gangland crime.
Spend enough time walking around Crumlin, and it becomes patently clear that its locals, the younger ones in particular, are fiercely proud of McGregor’s triumphs on the world stage.
The older locals offer a paternal nod of approval. No-one wants to be overly, demonstrably effusive about their champ; not in public anyway.
Drinkers at the Four Roads are getting more than used to reporters, both from here and abroad, scoping out information on McGregor and his background. Contrary to Thompson’s portrayal, many of the journalists even live to tell the tale.
Though enthused that McGregor is being afforded so much attention by the media, the word ‘journalist’ makes many of the younger Crumlin natives clam up.
Some claim to be pals of McGregor’s and are reluctant to talk to reporters about him, good or bad, seemingly bound to a code of silence.
With McGregor’s much-hyped bout with Mayweather drawing ever closer, there’s a palpable sense of anticipation in the air in Dublin 12. So as large gangs gather on street corners over the next two weeks, it’s unlikely to be for the gritty reasons Wright Thompson would have you believe. Rather they will be talking of the tactics their hero can use to overcome his biggest challenge yet.
McGregor managed to avoid crime