Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow

Travelling by tram, at least on the Green Line, had a bit of cachet. Being seeing on it was not necessarily a bad thing, whereas being seen on a Dublin bus, even a most respectable bus like the 7 or the 11, was an abject admission of social and economic failure. Only the young, the old and the poor used the bus. But any successful citizen in the prime of life could travel on the Luas, confident that neither their reputation nor self-esteem would be tarnished: doctors and architects, solicitors and designers, all used it, at least at weekends.

One
From the new glass bridge which spanned the inscrutable waters of the Grand Canal, the tram purred downhill and glided gently into the heart of the city. Like a slow Victorian roller coaster it swerved through Peter’s Place, passing chic apartments, their balconies rubbing shoulders with almost equally chic corporation houses, genteel vestiges of democracy that had contrived to survive in this affluent area. Then it swung nonchalantly onto Adelaide Road - the modernised version, all windows and transparency, where once there had been high hedges and minority religions. ‘Next stop - Harcourt,’ whispered the announcer. Her voice reminded Anna of Marilyn Monroe’s. ‘An céad stáisiún eile Sráid Earcair.’ The seductive tone always unnerved her, even though she presumed it had been designed to soothe her and her fellow passengers. That the translation was in Donegal Irish made it even more eerie. It was like a voice from fairyland or the world beneath the wave, from some place aeons away from the land of the Luas.