Dalymount Park is but half the place it once was, literally so. There is an open concrete terrace with plastic seating behind one goal and a roofed stand along one side. Yet it remains a mythical place.
At one corner of the ground, a mural of Bob Marley against a background of red, yellow and green has the date “1980” beside it, a reminder of the reggae star’s performance at the ground a year before his premature death. It is a reminder of a former Dublin, a reminder of the …
A judge has warned that Dublin is “increasingly dangerous.”
I do not find it to be so, certainly not when compared to Dublin of the 1980s. But perhaps it is because I have learned the trick of invisibility. I learned it from an old woman in Belfast.
I saw her on television one Saturday evening in the early 1990s as, I sat watching the BBC Northern Ireland news.
There had been trouble in North Belfast, disturbances on the streets and the throwing of bricks and petrol bombs. The rioting was …
A message from a former colleague expressed the wish that I was keeping healty and that the teaching was going well. It concluded with the sentence, “I miss your stories.”
It seemed an odd comment. I am one of the world’s worst storytellers, I get details confused or forget them altogether. I was once told in no uncertain terms that I “could bore from England.”
What I can do is remember the stories told by other people. Perhaps it was a skill built up by three decades of sitting at …
The writer of the book of memoirs died four years ago, at the age of ninety. The people about whom he wrote are a long time gone.
Inside the cover of his memoir is a photograph of a group of children, a young woman is standing beside them. The woman was so unobtrusive in her lifetime that it was a surprise to find her appearing in a picture at the front of a book.
The young woman pictured is now long dead; the man she would marry some years after …
Dublin has always been a place of characters. Anyone who does not believe me should meet some of the students I encounter on a daily basis. There is still the lightning wit that was always part of Dub life.
However, the city is now so diverse and populous that it is difficult for people to enjoy the fame (or infamy) of characters in the past – characters like Bang Bang.
I was first introduced to Bang Bang by a friend from Dublin 8.
…“He used to have an old church
On a Sunday a decade or so ago, I remember driving through the byroads of south Tipperary to reach a little church where a baptism was to take place. Above the village loomed Slievenamon, a mountain of magic and legend, a mountain whose tales seemed part of a religion set deeper in the culture than stories from First Century Palestine.
Slievenamon was a mountain that inspired music and song. It was Sliabh na mBan bhFionn, a place of fair women who enchanted the great warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill. It it …
