‘The house where my mother grew up consisted of two living rooms and a small kitchen. In 1958, a member of the local council arrived at the door and handed the family a key to their new house in Ballyboden, Dublin 16. Pearse Brothers Park was built in the late 1950s to house people from Willbrook and the surrounding areas, as their old cottages were demolished. The new housing was part of an initiative by the local authority to ‘improve the living standards for the local community’. Considering their dire living conditions, the family were still ambivalent about moving to these new suburbs. It was further away and felt like the countryside to them.

As a child growing up in Ballyboden, I was aware of a sense of isolation and lack of facilities. The fields, wasteland and burgeoning building sites were our playground. Becoming teenagers, we wandered the streets in gangs, perching ourselves on the nearest wall before being moved on. There was very little to do. The fields we had played in eventually became another housing estate, with facilities still scarce. The transport links were (and are) still poor.

In the late 1980s, I made my way into the city, drawn to the subcultural spaces – an antidote to suburbia. In 2002, as part of my BA in Photography, I made a series of photographs of old and new, bars and music venues in Dublin City, to express my disillusionment at the closure of many of my clubbing haunts, and the rise of more upmarket establishments. The photographs detailed the boarded-up exteriors of old venues and interiors of the new. I felt sadness for the buildings, and what they stood for: the ad hoc nature, the creativity, the possibility, the lawlessness; cheap and dirty and full of energy. Dublin was a few years into the Celtic Tiger phase, while homelessness was on the rise. Over two decades later, Dublin has its highest ever rate of homelessness, while a younger generation again exits the country.

In 2020 my PhD research into housing and planning in Cabra began.’

Mandy O’Neill

O’Neill’s approach to imagining and formalising the artworks for this exhibition underscores the process of planning and experimentation, with embodied experience and material thinking at the core of her research. Sustained engagement with the built environment and observation of construction processes, along with the desire to mimic her own spatial and somatic experience of Cabra, have resulted in a layered, photosculptural and architectural approach. Moving beyond the often utopian premises of planning and its impact on individuals and communities, this exhibition identifies slippages in time while exploring the potential of planning as a catalyst for collective transformation across the past, the present, and the future.

Best Laid Plans is the outcome of O’Neill’s four-year practice-based PhD research at Dublin City University, supported by the Irish Research Council.