Official URL: http://www.garrettphelan.com/FREE-THOUGHT-FM.pdf

For many Dubliners, the river Liffey forms a significant division, between quality to the south and poverty to the north. For many years, and until early in 2019, a billboard advertising a popular drink on the bridge that took trains across Lower Gardiner Street asked Dubliners passing beneath whether they were a ‘North Cider or South Cider?’ In 2015, convalescent beds at Mount Carmel community hospital in south Dublin were empty because “of a reluctance of northside patients to cross the Liffey”. In fact, the hospital was five kilometres south of the city and at some distance from public transportation, little bother to car-owning folk but an expensive hurdle for others. Provision in the south and hardship in the north; these differences are the result of the way the territory of the city is marked out and managed. There is nothing casual about the social geography of Dublin. It has always been inherently political.