After 17 years of bustle and hustle, a Ballymun supermarket closes its doors

About 10am on Friday in Ballymun the footpaths are busy and the bus stop crowded. It’s bright and cold and clear – a perfect November day.

In front of the SuperValu, which is on the ground floor of a six-storey apartment building, there’s a rack of warm winter coats.

Two people from Éíre Nua Food Initiative are giving them out and a steady stream of people are stopping to try them on, and then walking away wearing them.

Across from a green post box, the front doors of the SuperValu slide open. Inside, the shop smells like rotisserie chicken and is buzzing with activity.

A group of women in black SuperValu-branded tops are standing at the entrance near a wall of light-brown Toy Show boxes.

As customers come in through the doors, several of them older and pushing shopping trolleys, they stop and chat with the staff.

“It’s quite an emotional day,” John O’Toole says to Caroline Sheridan, who says she’s worked in the shop for ten and a half years.

After 17 years in business, this shop – and community hub – run by Robert Murphy is just hours away from shutting down permanently.

It’s a mutual decision between the Musgraves, which owns SuperValu, and Murphy, who owns the shop, he says – because business hasn’t been good.

“Through thick and thin”

As O’Toole is talking to Sheridan, Fiona Byrne, who’s worked the tills at the shop for three years, steps in, steps up, and just starts rhyming.

“Today is the saddest day in Ballymun, when all the till dogs must go their merry way,” Byrne starts.

“Through thick and thin, we’ve been so many friends, but in the end we’re a team that never ends,” she goes on.

“The love for the ’Mun, the love for our SuperValu, will have no end, because we’re Rob’s team until the very end.”

She breaks off: “Here, talk to John,” she recommends, and pulls O’Toole over.

An older man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a grey jacket over  a fuzzy burgundy jumper, O’Toole says he’s “just in for a bit of a yap, to pass the time”.

“There’s great people here,” O’Toole says. “I’ll chat with them all if they’ll chat with me. It depends on the humour they’re in.”

He says he’ll miss the SuperValu when it closes. “You can’t go into some of these other shops and stand and talk – they’ll move you on.”

“Here you can’t walk from the front of the shop to the back without chatting with someone,” he says.

A community shop

From near the Toy Show-box wall – 22 boxes high and 12 wide – Kirsty Lynch and Holly Sheridan call over.

They work here too, and want to talk.

Coming into the SuperValu isn’t like doing a shop at a Lidl or an Aldi, they say, their sentences sometimes taking turns, sometimes talking over each other.

“This is more of a, like, community shop,” Sheridan says.

“Yeah, family like, you wouldn’t get it in any other shop I don’t think,” Lynch says.

“You build relationships with the customers and that’s what I’m really gonna miss the most, all the relationships,” Sheridan says.

“Most of the old people come in just to talk, in the morning,” says Lynch.

“Yeah, John, he comes in like four times a day,” Sheridan says.

She continues: “It’s not just a big shop, it’s kinda like a big family. So it feels like we’re grieving doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, like there’s a death in the family,” Lynch says.

“And it hasn’t hit all of us actually until those doors close tonight,” Holly Sheridan says. “At 10 – isn’t it 10, Ma?”

Not leaving

Yes, 10pm, says Caroline Sheridan, standing a few metres away. Then the two start pouring out a river of praise of Robert Murphy.

“He’s brilliant, he’d give you anything, he’s an amazing man, inside and out,” she says.

Murphy still owns a much smaller Centra, around behind the Axis centre, more a convenience store than the proper supermarket the SuperValu is.

Caroline Sheridan says she and a couple other staff members from SuperValu will be moving over there.

“I don’t know what it’s gonna bring, but I still have to drive in me to see what we can do over there,” she says. “Hopefully new doors will open.”

Where’s Murphy just now? “It’s Rob, it could be anything, he’s involved in so many things in Ballymun,” she says.

“Serve yourselves!”

A group of staff gathers near the front of the shop to have their photo taken, and pulls O’Toole in as well.

“Serve yourselves!” Tyrrell shouts, laughing, to the three customers waiting in the queue to pay for the shopping.

But she is joking, of course, and they are quickly behind the tills again.

They are back to calling customers from the queue by name, asking after their families, following up on their news – and ringing up their purchases.

“Mary! Are you well?” Tyrrell calls to a woman with a shopping basket, who steps towards her with a smile.

Competition

Down the back of the shop, Jennifer O’Callaghan, Bernie Brennan and Vanessa Byrne are waiting in a long queue for the post office.

“It’s sad” the SuperValu is closing, Brennan says. “There’s nothing else around here like this.”

“We were promised a shopping centre,” Byrne says. “But there’s nothing.”

There’s a new-ish Lidl just up the road, which opened in late 2020. Just across the road from the Rediscovery Centre, the national centre for the circular economy.

“That’s where I’ll have to go now,” says O’Callaghan, but she doesn’t sound happy.

Since they are chatting, they are not moving along with the queue in front of them and a large gap opens up.

A woman waiting behind them gives a couple of loud “ahems” and the women cut off their conversation and move up towards the post office counters.

The Lidl in Ballymun is part of a whole new complex, which includes a 10-storey Aspen student accommodation, with the busy Grían cafe on the ground floor.

It’s only about 300 metres up the road from the SuperValu. On this Friday morning about 11am it is very quiet in the Lidl.

Footsteps and the “beep beep” of the tills are audible. There are no groups of people gathered together in the aisles chatting.

It’s busy enough, though, with about two dozen people in to do their shopping.