'Portal' linking Dublin and NYC reopens with 'bad behaviour' blockers
Ireland has reopened its newest and most hotly debated landmark, a screen allowing people in New York and Dublin to see each other, after the livestream was turned off in response to individuals flashing people on the other side of the Atlantic.
Less than a week after being turned on, Dublin City Council had said it was disabling the so-called "Portal" as it sought "technical solutions" to what it described as "inappropriate behaviour," which also included poeple showing hurtful images on phones.
Now up and running again since Monday, apparently without reports of major incidents, the Portal closes down for the day before Dublin pubs do, and also has new technical measures designed to block what Dublin municipal authority described as "bad behaviour."
Nollaig Fahy from Dublin City Council explained to Irish state broadcaster RTE that they are using plant boxes to keep people at a distance from the camera, while officials in New York have set up barriers.
After one person in Dublin held up a smartphone to the Portal's camera to fill the entire livestream with an image of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, the Portal now also has a sensor that blurs the image on both sides when an object comes too close to the camera.
Footage shared on social media shows passers-by in the US being subjected to Dubliners mooning at and "grinding" against the portal, while others in view appeared to be drunk or taking drugs.
Explaining what went wrong with the landmark's launch, Fahy said the time zone difference between New York and Dublin was a factor, given that many people in Dublin emerge from pubs in late evening when New Yorkers are only coming home from work.
"The key issue was that the poor behaviour was being broadcast to the street in New York at a particularly difficult time because it's rush hour time," Fahy said.
The Portal's livestream is now set to shut down before most pubs close in Dublin and locals spill out onto city centre streets. The operating hours are now 11 am to 9 pm in Dublin and 6 am to 4 pm in New York.
Each fitted with a small camera, the pair of round screens began streaming live street footage from one city to the other on May 8.
The landmark's website described Dublin - where street violence last year prompted the US embassy to warn tourists to be careful while visiting - as "a beacon of innovation and charm."
Dublin and New York have a history of people-to-people ties, in large part because of high levels of emigration from Ireland throughout the 19th century, when it was ruled by Britain, as well as in the 1950s and 1980s.
Dublin's half of the video link was placed in the city centre, giving a view of O'Connell Street, Europe's widest thoroughfare, while New York's is at Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street, next to the landmark Flatiron Building.
Both Portal videos are to remain connected until at least autumn this year, while Dublin was to be linked in the meantime to portals in Brazil, Lithuania and Poland, the homelands of tens of thousands of recent immigrants to Ireland.
