It’s seven years this week since my glasses flew off me onto the Benburb Street footpath as I was pushed to my hands and knees by the ‘junkie’ stealing my phone.
It’s only in recent months I can say that the sense of fear I get at certain times walking along Dublin streets has abated.
A joking matter?
I joke it’s the reason I left Dublin a year later for a small town in the sunny south east of Ireland. I also joke I should have known better to be walking home along the Luas track from Dublin city centre, along Benburb Street (a name traditionally synonymous with red light district).
I make it a funny and shocking story as I know people who have gone through much worse and this incident is on the lighter end of the scale.
One in two women in Ireland avoid certain areas for fear of…
Still, it is my story and I was reminded of it when I heard that an EU study on violence against women has found that half of Irish women surveyed avoided taking certain streets or going to certain areas for fear of being physically or sexually assaulted.
Why I remember this
In 2011 I read a book Brain Matters by John Medina which explains in very simple terms how our brain works. When something disturbing happens and we have the urge to ring all our friends and tell them about it, it’s our brain trying to reinforce the memory. That’s why I can tell you exactly what happened.
The long walk home
It was a bright early March evening, just like this week, with the ‘grand stretch’ surprising us all and putting a spring in our step. Rather than get the Luas from the city centre to Heuston I decided to walk – and talk. It was between 5 and 6 when Luas carriages get crammed. I rang my mother – we had a family wedding the next day – and the first coincidence is me telling her various points on my route. “I’m just walking through Smithfield now.” I actually remember having a strange feeling, let’s call it a sixth sense, that something wasn’t right.
After Smithfield, at the corner of Queen Street the Luas has to stop at a junction. It was along here a tall man with dark hair, (wearing a hood and a tracksuit) walked past and looked right into my eyes. That was weird.
I was still talking to my mother on the phone. Next thing, I felt a tug at my right ear/hand, where I was holding the phone. I struggled. How I thought I could fight him, I do not know. I wouldn’t leave go and the struggle resulted in him pushing me to the ground. (That’d be an example of the victim blaming herself).
I obviously screamed because that’s what my mother heard and then his footsteps as he ran away. She screamed, because she didn’t know what had happened me, and that alerted the rest of the family at home. They thought I was dead, her scream was so bloodcurdling.
The help of strangers
There was a full Luas stopped right beside me, and the people on it could do nothing. I picked up my glasses and a passerby helped me up. I can’t recall her name, she was a nurse and on her way home from work.
I asked if she had a phone so I could ring my mother and tell her I was alright. She didn’t have a phone. Even in my shock I had humour, I thought this was funny the last woman in Dublin not to have a mobile phone is helping me after I get my phone robbed. Some other Good Samaritans pulled up in a car and gave me a mobile phone to ring home quickly to say I was alright and to ring Vodafone to cancel my phone.
I didn’t know what to do – I was closer to my apartment than the nearest Garda Station. I took the first woman’s offer to walk me back to Store Street Garda Station, I felt it was the right thing to report it in case it could help someone else. I then took the Luas to Heuston and went to my then boyfriend’s nearby apartment.
The pointlessness of it all
He’d been trying to ring me. Also coincidentally, he had woken up at the time of the robbery and tried to phone me – it rang out and on subsequent attempts it was dead, thanks to my family calling Vodafone.
Having the EMEI code meant that the phone was completely cancelled/wiped within hours (once I rang Vodafone myself), so even if the ‘junkie’ sold it on, it was useless to the buyer.
The after effects
I spent the evening phone friends and family, I just kept retelling the story, which is interesting as little did I know it was the brain’s attempt of preserving the memory. I had a grazed knee and the scuffing of the jacket and jeans I was wearing where they had collided with the footpath was a long term reminder of that March evening.
A year later I moved out of Dublin when a contract came to an end. It was something I had been considering for other reasons, the phone robbery didn’t help. (I avoid calling it mugging as I don’t think I was physically injured enough for it to be a mugging.)
I just didn’t feel safe. A few months afterwards when I was on a bit of a fitness buzz most evenings I would walk from Ballsbridge to O’Connell Bridge after work. I felt safe there with other office workers walking home. 40 minutes in the adrenaline was rushing and while my heart (no pun intended) wanted to walk home along the quays towards Heuston, the head did not. So I’d jump on a bus and nervously walk around the corner to where I lived. I am still very wary, I watch my shadow, I keep an eye out especially in Dublin, I’m reluctant to take out my phone (why I don’t tweet or Facebook much from Dublin).
For years after I would feel a rush of fear if someone passed by me on foot quickly or unexpectedly on my right hand side. I would have been particularly jumpy or cautious in certain places, which in fairness is no harm.
But the fact that I even add that in is not a good thing, it’s a reminder as to how unacceptable it is to feel safe on the streets of Ireland.
I am one of those 52% of Irish women.
