by Karl Whitney
An essay written for the online literature journal Some Blind Alleys.
"Tallaght was an attempt at an instant city: take a landscape, build some houses, add people, and stir. In this,... more
"Tallaght was an attempt at an instant city: take a landscape, build some houses, add people, and stir. In this, it predated many of the larger schemes of the Celtic Tiger era. Tallaght no longer seems an isolated, freakish, and unplanned outgrowth of Dublin; rather it appears as the precursor of a way of building and living that subsequently became the norm in Ireland – an accelerated process in which a new population moves into massive housing developments that have seemingly been dropped at random into mostly untouched terrain. Tallaght was a grand, messy experiment, where the urban implications of modern Ireland were lived out but never fully resolved."
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