DUBLIN:Henry Street and Moore Street have always been busy, but traders are struggling to keep business alive-alive-oh as shoppers gravitate towards the big multinationals. ROSEMARY MACCABEmeets some of the local shopkeepers and street sellers. Photographs: Brenda Fitzsimons

ON A SUNNY Friday morning in August, Henry Street in Dublin city centre is swarming with people – and it is loud. Outside Penneys on Mary Street, women sell strawberries – “€2 for strawberries! Strawberries €2!” – out of vintage prams. Further down the street, three men in their 30s play Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive on harmonica, accordion and trumpet along to a backing track. Theirs is the most popular street performance of the day. Beside me, a middle-aged woman sways and claps; a child in a buggy holds her teddy bear aloft, tossing him from side to side in time with the music.

At the junction of Moore and Henry streets, the music is of a different genre. Two street sellers are creating a harmonious melody. One, in a deep alto, is singing of “apples, five for €1” while another is touting “bananas, eight for €2” in a lilting contralto. Towards Henry Street, four young African women stride back and forth, brandishing what look like tiny horse tails in their hands and approaching female passers-by: “Hey, beautiful, you want hair extensions?”

This blend of young and old, Irish and African, white and black, is the music of a modern Ireland.

“The Henry Street area is a perfect family market,” says Richard Guiney, chief executive of Dublin City Business Improvement District, a not-for-profit organisation set up in 2008 with the aim of developing and promoting the economic development of Dublin city. In short, its goal is to get people shopping.

“It’s a good, pleasant environment, and it’s easily accessible. There’s good car parking and it’s on public transport routes.”

Historically, Grafton Street was seen as Dublin’s shopping district, at least before the boom went bust, but Guiney says footfall on Grafton Street is not altogether indicative of its levels of trade. “With Grafton Street, it’s an access street as much as anything else.”

The litmus test of this is to take a walk down both streets.

What Guiney says holds true. On Grafton Street, on a weekday, people walk at speed up and down, with the looks of people who do not want to be stopped.

On Henry Street, they are strolling. Families with buggies, lone men and women carrying paper shopping bags, mothers and daughters catching up over some shopping and coffee.

ON NEIGHBOURING MOORE STREET the past decade has brought something of a resurgence, with formerly derelict buildings that once sold dolls, ribbons and assorted bric-a-brac now occupied by Chinese restaurants, Asian food markets, African beauty salons, the much-lauded Paris Bakery at No 13, as well as Delhi O’Deli, an unassuming restaurant selling Indian vegetarian street food.

They share this corner of Dublin city with the traditional street vendors, some of whom are third-generation traders on Moore Street.

“We’ve been here – me and Imelda, my sister – we’ve been working here for over 40 years,” says Margaret Buckley, who was 20 when she started selling fish from a stall on Moore Street, like her mother and grandmother before her.

“I didn’t ever want to do anything with regards to street trading, but then I got into it . . . we took it on as a labour of love, because we loved our mother. Now, it’s about keeping a tradition alive.”

Street traders may have the gift of the gab – “Would you like to taste one of these apples, love? Those prawns are from Ecuador. Best prawns this side of Hong Kong” – but few on Moore Street want to speak about their business.

“Ask Mags, down at the fish, she’ll talk to you.” I say I’ve spoken to her already. “Then ask Bernie. See Bernie, down there at the chocolates? She’ll talk to you.”

Bernie won’t divulge her second name, nor will she allow our conversation be recorded. She will, however, say the influx of foreign nationals has been good for the area, but bad for trade.

“The foreigners have come in and they’re taking all the places,” she says, gesturing to the shops that line Moore Street, barely visible behind the piles of fruit and veg stacked up on the stalls that populate the road itself.

She pauses for a moment, takes a breath. “It’s just as well, I suppose, because they’d be derelict if they didn’t . . .”

Jaspal Singh runs a toy shop at 6 Moore Street. It is the width of a doorway and as deep as an Opel saloon. Inside, multicoloured toys hang in their packaging from hooks affixed to every possible surface. “No,” says Singh, when asked, “ is not busy.”

Singh has been in Ireland for 10 years. He is originally from Punjab, in the northwest of India, but he has no plans to return.

“I am citizen,” he says. “I am the Irish citizenship!” At this he looks proud, buoyed by his sense of belonging in this country of a thousand welcomes. But he doesn’t, he says, feel welcomed.

Though Singh speaks with broken English – he responds to every question with a smile, a mumbled word here, another there – he has a few phrases down pat, with an impeccable Dublin accent. “Go home, you f***ing Osama Bin Laden!” he says, shaking his head. “Little children, they say, ‘You Osama Bin Laden, you f*** off, you terrorist.’ ” He looks confused. “I am Sikh,” he says. “Sikh!” He points to his dastar, the turban that is mandatory for Sikhs, who are, he says, “no Muslim”.

He buys his fruit and vegetables from the Asian food market, but he doesn’t eat out at Indian restaurants in Dublin, because he is a vegetarian. “Restaurants here, all meat. I eat the home food, only the home food,” he says.

Helen Steven, from Nigeria, has been in Ireland for three years and works at FF Hair Wave Saloon, a salon selling hair extensions and relaxer creams. She spends most of her time on the corner of Moore and Henry streets, soliciting custom from passers-by. “It’s very quiet, so we come here to look for customers,” she says.

Steven doesn’t buy from the street traders either. “I shop in Africa shop,” she says. “Except for milk and Corn Flakes, then I go to Lidl or Tesco.”

Even Margaret Buckley, who has devoted 40 years of her life to upholding the tradition her mother loved so well, doesn’t do her shopping on the street. “I shop in Marks Spencer,” she says. “Or, you know, Tesco.”

It’s midday now and trade is gathering momentum on Moore Street and on Henry Street, where some multinational shops have staked their claim on the shopping thoroughfare. Amy O’Dwyer has come into town for the morning because the post office in Whitehall, where she lives, has closed down and, “with the free transport, it’s as easy to come in here. It’s more a walk than anything else.”

O’Dwyer is 79 and remembers a different time, and a different kind of trade. “I used to walk with my mother up here and there were tiny little shops, all selling one thing. Maybe one sold potatoes and vegetables, and the other sold bottles. And there was a woman who just sold ice cream, so you’d go in and sit down and have an ice cream. Everyone was content in those days just to make a little profit, just to get by. But once the supermarkets came along, they took away everyone’s business. And they took away the atmosphere.”

O’Dwyer is the first – and only – person I speak to who does not mention Tesco in her list of grocery shopping destinations. “I shop on Earl Street for groceries,” she says. “And I get fruit here. But,” she says, and points to the fruit sellers at the top of the street, “not up there, because they’re all dear. You have to go up past the middle.”

On Mary Street, Betty Walsh is selling strawberries. “I’ve been here for a few years,” she says, and pauses to do her maths. “About 20 years.” Walsh grew up on Church Street, beside the fruit markets, although street trading wasn’t the family business; it was just what she ended up doing. But times are tough: “If you pay dear for the berries, you have to sell them dear. And sometimes Marks [ Spencer] has them on offer, and Aldi is so cheap . . .”

For every person who approaches Walsh’s stall, five go into Penneys, right behind her; for each purchase made at the Buckleys’ fish stall – by my count, five in the 15 minutes I stand there – at least 20 people stroll by carrying paper shopping bags from Arnotts, Debenhams, Next or any of the myriad shops a stone’s throw away.

Guiney says traffic on Henry Street exists for one reason: “People are there to shop.”

Judging by the rustle of paper bags and the queues of people trying on shoes at the Arnotts “shoe garden”, paying for dresses in Spanish retail giant Zara or stocking up on cut-price jackets in Penneys, he’s right. But for the area’s street traders, some of whom have spent decades attempting to keep an old Dublin tradition alive, it’s a harsh reality: people may be shopping, but they’re not buying from them.