Around The Table
Feeding
You’d never go hungry in Dublin City “Our flat was just over the stew house and I remember the smells making their way up. Myself and my sister would love to go in and sit with the old people and get some dinner and chat but my older sister wouldn’t come in and she’d slag us.” Liza, The Snug Woman’s Group The idea of looking out for each other and sharing even when you may not have a lot yourself stretches back as far as people in Dublin can remember, with the tradition of ‘silent giving’ sometimes over a lifetime, only being discovered at a person’s funeral. A theme of looking out for each other, particularly around food has emerged through the project either through small quiet acts of generosity or on a much larger scale with food provision for those who need it across the city.
The Manchester Guardian was so moved by visiting Liberty Hall that they proclaimed “no Labour headquarters in Europe has contributed so valuably to the brightening of the lives of the hard-driven workers around it…it is a hive of social life”. It put food into bellies, and ideas into heads.
Penny dinners and stew houses could be thought of as belonging to a distant past but these centres are still active and responding to a need in Dublin. Since the recent recession and housing crisis the need has increased to a point where the Capuchin Centre in Bow Street recently gave out 1,700 food parcels to people. Br. Kevin believes passionately in respecting the dignity of the individual. Offers during the recent horse meat scandal and of out of date food are firmly rejected on the grounds that ‘if they’re not good Jim Larkin, a, pivotal figure of Irish trade union and enough to sell why should they be good enough for socialist history was part of that tradition of feeding in Dublin. Larkin purchased the old Northumberland people in need?’ Hotel, located at Beresford Place, and reinvented St. Joseph’s Penny Dinners, on the ground floor of it as ‘Liberty Hall’. Crucially, the kitchens of the Avondale House, has a similar ethos to protect the former hotel would prove to be vitally important dignity of the person. Each item on the menu has a during the 1913 Lockout dispute, when thousands price to enable an exchange to take place although of Dublin workers were systematically locked out of employment by leading Dublin employers. Countess no discussion ever takes place about money nor is anyone ever turned away. Markievicz was among those to work in the Liberty Hall soup kitchen. Some estimates say as many as two thousand children were fed by this soup kitchen daily during the height of the dispute. Larkin placed a remarkable emphasis on counter-cultural endeavour and building a working class culture.
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St Joseph’s Penny Dinners, Cumberland Street
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