We Are Dublin #3

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wearedublin CONCEPT/EDITOR: CONOR PURCELL CONTRIBUTORS: LILY AKERMAN, TRISTAN HUTCHINSON, BRENDAN MACEVILLY, LOIS KAPILA, MARCEL KRUEGER, JAMES LAWLESS, DONAL MOLONEY, NATHAN HUGH O’ DONNELL, BRIAN PURCELL, CONAL THOMAS, JESSICA TRAYNOR COVER IMAGE: CONOR PURCELL

six + west COPYRIGHT: SIXWEST MEDIA WEAREDUBLIN.IE HELLOSIXWEST.COM PUBLISHED IN DUBLIN, MARCH 2015 ISSN 2009-7492

2015

003 HREE

ET ISSU

CH MAR

CONTENTS

DISPATCHES / 10 THE NEWSAGENT / 18 ALDBOROUGH HOUSE / 28 BALLYBOUGH RACERS / 38 THE RISE OF IRISH WHISKEY / 46 NOTES FROM A REDEMPTION / 56 THE VINYL KING OF EAST WALL / 68 THE LAST NAZI / 78 THE LIBERTIES / 88 THE BIRD MARKET / 100

EDITOR’S LETTER This third issue has been a struggle. Various other aspects of life intruded, including a house move, which meant I was not able to devote as much attention to this as I wanted. After all the upheaval, I was left with a magazine I was not happy with. It would have been easier to send it out as is, but I want this magazine to get better each issue, not worse.

So, many rewrites, redesigns and recommissions later, here we are.

Creating and publishing a magazine solo is freeing – I am not beholden to a sales team or publisher (I effectively, or ineffectively, function as both) and so I am able to concentrate on the writing, the photography and the design. Is such autonomy sustainable? I hope so. I will start producing videos later this year, and launch another magazine, and there are various other projects on the boil. I hope you join us for the ride.

CONOR PURCELL MARCH 2015

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the newsagent

It’s a couple of minutes before I get chatting to Pat Gorry, owner of The Midway on Seapoint Avenue as he’s busy talking to a customer about Kilkenny hurling. He addresses nearly half the customers by name. “It’s amazing the amount of people that I’ve come to know.

Even the passing trade you come to know after seventeen years.”

The Midway is, by Pat’s own account, a traditional kind of shop. Its front window is large and clear, and completely free of adverts when I first visit Pat in early December. The fridge is stocked with rashers and sausages. Indestructible cans of grapefruit segments and rice pudding line the shelves, alongside cartons of custard, cereals and preserves. The till-side shelves are lined with neat rows of chocolates and sweets. A metal stand by the window is filled with the more exotic, lesser-spotted confections of childhood: Refresher bars, Jawbreakers, Drumsticks.

The Midway has the feel of a social centre. Pat confirms this: “This shop is probably the local hub of what’s happening around. People come in here for all kinds of information. A lot of locals would call every day. They would pick up the paper and a pack of fags.”

There’s no carefully placed marketing paraphernalia subliminally encouraging an impulse buy. You just pick up the bits you want and stop to pass the time of day if you have it.

Pat is not the only person that’s been in the shop the past fifteen years.

Colin Gleeson grew up around the corner from Seapoint Avenue. He’d have been in regularly as a kid, when his older brother worked in the shop. At the age of fifteen Colin replaced his brother. Fifteen years on, he works as a news reporter at the Irish Times but still puts in a shift a week at The Midway.

Like Colin, my first job at the age of fifteen was in a shop – an independent video shop called Pick-a-Flick. I earned four pounds an hour – twenty-four quid for a six-hour shift. The shifts on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoons in summer were the best when the shop was totally dead, only the odd customer returning a video from the previous night. The shop became a hangout for me and my friends. We wasted hours that summer watching softcore porn on a fourteen-inch TV hung in the corner, pressing pause and trying to act natural when a customer dropped in every half hour or so.

This is to explain the beginnings of my nostalgic relationship with the small independent shop. It was the most enjoyable job I ever had and it was lost to irreversible changes in the home entertainment market.

Next door to Pick-a-Flick was a newsagents much like The Midway. I remember it first as Hyland’s, then as Maggie’s, and a few years later as The Three Rock. The shop is now a Pizza Hut takeaway.

The nearby Topaz now serves as the locality’s convenience store.

There was also Ms O’Shea’s shop in Ballinskellings, Kerry. It was a tiny shop across the road from a holiday home that my family has rented every other summer for the past thirty years. It began and fed my addiction to rhubarb and custard lollipops and Cadbury’s Mint Crisps. It sold cooked ham, noisily cut by an in situ meat slicer. And, of course, milk, bread and the paper. It was a place where you got your groceries along with the local news and weather forecast. We were rarely in and out without stopping for a chat.

Unlike the shops of my childhood, however, The Midway is still in business. It has weathered the seven-year economic storm and has, for the moment at least, fended off the need to succumb to the modern franchise model. “You’re going down a different route,” says Pat of the Londis, Spar, and Centra model. “They want everything laid out just as they want it. They have you pay for the signage and the set up. You’re nearly working for them, you know, when you’ve been working for yourself all your life. You’d be selling your soul.”

40, 50 per cent on. I’d love to be just selling sweets and ice-cream and water or bottles; that’d be brilliant, but it doesn’t work like that.”

When Pat started out in business, you couldn’t buy a bottle of water in a shop. “Anyone going down that route,” he says, “you’d be saying they were insane. Now bottled water is the best selling drink in the shop.”

The Midway has adjusted to people’s changed shopping habits. “We had a deli, up until the crash. Hot sandwiches and hot rolls. When the crash came then, we closed the deli. People ran out of money, there were no builders anymore.”

Seven or eight years ago people would come in to The Midway and walked out with a bag in each hand.

But Pat has noticed a major shift in people’s shopping habits. “It’s mostly convenience now. It’d be bread, milk, cigarettes, sweets and chocolate. Ice-cream in the summer and fuel in the winter. They buy all their groceries in Lidl and Aldi.”

Pat is now selling half the papers he was fifteen years ago. Those days are gone, he says. “There was a time the newspaper was the mainstay of a newsagents. In time they’ll only be selling the Saturday paper. It’ll almost turn into a magazine. I’d say in 20 years time there’ll be no papers at all.”

So how does The Midway make ends meet? There’s a 10 per cent margin on cigarettes. That’s the lowest. Milk or bread might be only 15 or 20 per cent, 25 per cent on a newspaper. “The stuff you want to But some things never change. “The be selling is chocolate, sweets, ice- cigarettes are the one thing that cream, drinks, which you’ll get 30, have held through over the years.

No matter what happens, they still keep smoking.” Early January, Lent, or following the Budget, Pat’s regulars invariably give up the fags, but not for long. “A week or two later they’re back on them more than ever. I know people are healthier nowadays, but that wouldn’t be reflected by what they buy in this shop.

You still have people coming in buying a half a pound of sausages and bottles of Coke.” It would seem that the supermarket is where we make responsible shopping choices, the convenience store is where we come for the quick hit, the little luxuries.

The shop itself has changed little in the past fifteen years too.

Pat nods to the dairy cabinet at the back “That was here when I came in, though it’s had about fifteen motors. It’s like Trigger’s brush. He thinks he’s had the same brush for years, but he’s changed the brush and the handle six or seven times.”

The Midway’s survival comes down to its low levels of debt. Others who took out loans or invested in their business at the wrong time would have gone under, or would be under severe pressure to work their way out of debt.

“I was brought up in business,” says Pat. “Retail is the only thing I know.”

ing. Pat came to Dublin with his wife Chris to mind the shop while his brother was selling it; they ended up buying it themselves.

“If you want to run a business in Dublin, you won’t get much nicer than Monkstown. This is as good as it gets.”

But the The Midway was so called long before Pat took over. There are two explanations for the origin of the name. The first and most obvious is that the shop is half way between the villages of Blackrock and Monkstown. The other, says Pat, is that an American who owned the shop back in the forties or fifties fought in the Battle of Midway. The battle was a decisive naval victory for the Americans over the Japanese in WWII, and the first naval defeat for the Japanese since 1863.

Pat received this explanation second hand from a local couple, Jock and Stella, who’ve since passed away. Perhaps the American shopkeeper’s unusual choice was inspired by the naming of Sutton’s T.E.K. dairy in Monkstown which delivered produce to the shop around that period. Sutton’s T.E.K. (or Tel-el-Kebir) was apparently named by its founder, Thomas Sutton, after the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir (1882) in which he’d fought — a British military manoeuvre designed to maintain control over financial interest in Egypt, particularly the Suez Canal.

His father ran a petrol station in Enfield where he first worked.

Then he ran his own shop and later a pub. Pat’s brother bought The Midway but decided after two years he wanted to go back to teach- It’s an odd thing to have a sense 024

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of nostalgia for the present moment, for something that still exists. Is there a word for that? I work on Parnell Square North. I’m situated between Parnell Street to the south and Dorset Street to the north. Within that corridor, moving east, the independent newsagent and convenience store still reigns supreme. Many with carefully arranged window displays of cheap toys, others with unlikely sized boxes of Persil or Daz or 16-packs of toilet roll. They exist in an anachronistic economy, where the value of the custom in the area appears not to merit the investment in a franchise convenience store.

There’s something comforting in the idea of a business for whom profit is the main agenda, but not the sole concern. Providing a community space is another. “For some of the customers, the shop might be their only social outlet during the day,” explains Colin Gleeson. While we’re talking, Colin spots a car parked directly outside The Midway with the driver’s window down.

He leaves me alone in the shop, returns a half-minute later, collects a few bits and pieces from the shelves, runs them through the till, and delivers them back out to the car with the change. “John suffers from MS. He has difficulty walking.

It was actually his sister-in-law who helped me get into the Irish Times.”

him they are old neighbours as well as customers, but now they are his readers too. They take an interest in his writing career, ask how he’s getting on. His relationship with Pat has evolved too. It began as employer–employee, but both are now firm friends. “We’d meet up for pints. We talk about things that are important to us, the future of the shop or my own plans.”

Pat believes that these shops are the last of their kind. He admits that he needs to modernise the shop if it’s to be viable. He envisages part of the shop as a café, he’d get in an ice-cream machine, seats and tables outside in the sun. “It’s a very good time to get photos of the shop,” he says, “because in a few years’ time this will not here be in its present form. Whether I’m the man to take on that job is another question.”

Pat knows too that Colin won’t stay on for ever. But it has certainly been a good run. He acknowledges the fact that had his first summer job been in a Spar or Centra or Londis he wouldn’t be there fifteen years later. There are few jobs so carefree, few commercial spaces so enjoyable to spend time, or working relationships so particular to warrant such loyalty and friendship.

Many of the people who come in to the shop would know Colin. To 026

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Brendan Mac Evilly is a writer based in Ballsbridge

paradise lost

the strange case of aldborough house

“One-ninety-five, please.” That’s the litany I recite every morning boarding the 130 bus from the city centre. I’ve never been sure I’m paying the correct fare but I have yet to ask for correction. As my bus trundles down Abbey Street, past Busáras and Connolly Station, it eventually reaches Amiens Street, and if the lights are with us, speeds past the Five Lamps onwards. However, if reds are all you hit then at this point you may find yourself looking left up Portland Row. A curious sight awaits you. Here lies an incongruously large stone building, clearly aged, fenced off from its surroundings, never lit from within.

observe along the way several jumpers tangled and shredded within the multiple metal spikes denying entry to the grounds. Here the ivy-strewn rear of the house looms over children and adults waiting for their next customer; perhaps the same children who once got caught and lost their jumper.

To even imagine what the interior might contain comes only from a crack of broken glass; most of the lower level entrances are definitively shut, Soviet-era style metal slabs fitted to deny even a glimpse of the many rooms. It’s easy to pass Aldborough, stand perplexed for a moment and move on. The inevitable curiosity of the passer-by, bred from the derelict appearance, is rapidly displaced by the everyday. The bluster and volume of the surrounding area leaves little time for quiet rumination. So I move on.

At ground level, one approaches Aldborough House with a sense of trepidation. The building’s vastness, its granite exterior, Doric columns and Latin motto are all that remains of a once-great estate, what was once the second biggest Georgian residence in Dublin with only Leinster House larger. The broken windows, spiked railings and metal boards suggest catastrophe. One wonders how this Palladian para- Walking up Portland Row and home dise met its end in such desolation towards Phibsborough, I know that and how such ruin took hold.

I’m in the heart of the inner city.

Acres of damp-stained tenement Peering inside the front gates, I flats, abandoned lots, briars and notice some graffiti to the left, brambles sprouting up from cracked leaves and moss engulfing the pavements. These images cannot tarmac below and a large portico. be erased from Dublin. There is Strewn along the exterior wall is no template for the urban. It is, by a plastic banner advertising a carwash service at the side entrance.

I walk round to have a look and 030

turns, both structured and chaotic.

Yet the image of Aldborough is not easily forgotten. The house stands like a temporary film-set at the centre of a reality it no longer recogthe fashionable gaze, was allowed nises, and that no longer recognises to crack and split and decay. it, both structured and chaotic in its own refusal to update.

The house stands at the centre of an area which, owing to wilful neglect We, as Dubliners, like to boast of our and a steady increase in social discultural and political heritage. We order, has fallen into disrepute and claim, as the mythos dictates, to be disrepair. If one walks along Amiens a city that forced the British Empire Street, up Portland Row and back to heed and to have since utilised the towards the North Strand, you’ll see concrete artefacts of colonialism to little structured planning and open our own benefit and profit. These space. Rows of Georgian cottages, remaining structures now function blocks of purpose-built corporation as offices, shopping centres, banks flats, a methadone clinic, a decayand museums while thick layers of ing 18th century mansion. As fascigreen paint coat every post-box in nating as urban dwelling and a lack town. Like all small states that gain of uniformity can be, the littered their independence, we are indusstreets and the lack of architecturtrious and have had to improvise. al symmetry highlight the ongoing Why, then, is Aldborough House trouble with this area – it hasn’t allowed to stand a wrecked shell? been touched for some years. These streets seem fixed in grim perpetuIf the house lay south of the river, ity and for many it is a section of the there is little doubt its restoration city to simply ‘get through.’ would long ago have been complete.

Quite likely it would house a restauIn August of last year I rememrant or cultural centre by now. The ber passing Luigi’s chipper on the ‘boom’ years essentially dictated North Strand Road, a stone’s throw that certain areas be built up to enfrom Aldborough, in the early hours hance the wealth of the comfortable of Monday morning. Parked on the in Dublin, leaving other sections of pavement outside was a silver car the city by the wayside. As the Celtic surrounded with what looked like a Tiger ploughed onwards, high-rise dozen or so traffic cones. I thought apartment complexes littered the it strange that one cone had been horizon across the river; colossal cranes became an optical still-frame in the eyes of every Dubliner. Aldborough House, tucked away from 033

reserved and placed atop the bonnet of the car. It transpired that the cone, and the adjoining black plastic bag, was placed carefully in order to cover up the blood of David ‘Gummy’ Sheridan. A small-time offender and drug addict, Sheridan was stabbed to death with a kitchen knife outside Luigi’s shortly before midnight the night before. Donal Colgan, who resided a short distance away at the Killarney Court Flats, began an argument with Sheridan which spilled out onto the street and was thought to have ended there, only for Colgan to return a short time later and stab Sheridan several times before fleeing.

Two months later, on the night of October 26th, a taxi driver was held at gunpoint with a sawn-off shotgun by a man the papers described as a “crazed… homeless drug addict.” A short time later, as Ciaran Brooks and his girlfriend walked up the North Strand Road and onto Portland Row, they were approached by the same man, who then chased Brooks past Aldborough House, down Killarney Street and pulled the trigger as Brooks attempted to scale the railings of the nearby flats.

The victim’s injuries (two close range blasts to the head) were so severe the authorities had difficulty officially identifying him. Brooks was 33 years old. A few hours after the shooting, the 31 year-old killer robbed and beat a homeless man on Mabbot Lane where he had bedded down for the night. He was arrest-

ed a short time later. The question begged, when such brutality is rife, who in their right mind would want to touch Aldborough House, a decaying antique located at the centre of a broken district where violence abound?

The house was built in 1796 by Edward Stratford, and one only has to look at Stratford’s London home, Stratford House (now a private member’s club), to see how buildings can be preserved, and used, in a sympathetic manner. Aldborough has been used as a school, a post office, and a barracks (during the Crimean War).

Up until 1999, the house was owned and maintained by Telecom Eireann. Several companies considered buying it before it was sold in 2005, for Eur4.5 million, to Aldborough Developments. Part of the Ely Properties network established by developer Philip Marley, the company originally intended for Aldborough to become a medical care facility.

Since the sale, however, Ely properties has been placed in receivership by the Bank of Ireland which provided the capital required for the purchase in the first place.

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At one stage, the condition of the house was so precarious that Dublin City Council requested that emergency repairs be carried out in order to maintain the stability of the roof. However, it seems as though Aldborough remains outside the receivership process and thus the instruction was ignored.

Untended and unguarded, the house has been left subject to theft and vandalism. As a result of such inaction, the lead and piping was stolen from the parapets and gutters and significant water damage occurred. In 2011, upon the orders of the council, emergency repairs were eventually carried out on the roof which, for now, remains stable.

The council themselves have, however, consistently refused to issue a Compulsory Purchase Order which might see Aldborough finally recovered. The post-boom phraseology – ‘High-Court order,’ ‘legal evasion,’ ‘liquidation,’ ‘receivership,’ ‘compulsory purchase order’ – does little in reality though and only further serves to highlight the ongoing inaction and indifference, further obfuscating the question of moral and civic responsibility.

The damp and rot have, by now, settled. The metal slabs look set to stay. In 2013 a suspected arson attack nearly engulfed the premises. It feels, and certainly appears, that Aldborough House will remain dismantled, abandoned until the elements have taken their share of 037

the wreckage. Yet there are those in Dublin who wish to help and who desire to, if not restore, than to protect what remains. An Taisce, the National Trust of Ireland, now lists Aldborough as one of the most at risk buildings in the country. They have campaigned for the last number of years to force legal proceedings in order to ensure the building remains secure from any further endangerment and to initiate discussions in order to find an immediate use for the building. Recently, however, the house was purchased by the business man Pat O’ Donnell.

Besides opening the grounds to facilitate bargain car washes, Mr. O’ Donnell’s intentions with the purchase remain unclear. An Taisce, amongst others, are currently seeking clarity on the matter.

A legal stalemate, an abandoned property of diminishing value, a developer flown the coop. Postboom Ireland is littered with such failures. In the meantime, my bus will still find its way down Amiens Street. The delivery trucks will lower their pallets down onto the pavement, the cacophony of car horns and rattled rails will remind me it’s almost time for work. Little will stir at Aldborough House. If you happen to pass by soon, pause for a moment and consider this case of chronic neglect, this shape less recognisable each week.

Conal Thomas is a writer based in Phibsborough

t h e ballybough

boy racers

As I leave the Fairview Centra, rain mists my face. The evening is darkening, though it’s just past five.

The plastic bag I carry tangles with my handbag straps as I walk in the direction of the Luke Kelly Bridge.

A flock of boys, the eldest no more than ten, pass me by. I watch them as they swarm like starlings, moving as one towards the end of the road, then back again, until they are all around me. Their energy crackles.

One grabs my handbag, tries to pull it off my shoulder: “Gis yer bag missus!” The others laugh.

Although the boy clutching at my bag is pulling it as hard as he can, he must only be around seven years old. There’s no chance I’m going to let it go. I sigh and walk on with the kids in tow. We pass the Jewish Cemetery on Fairview Strand, now hidden behind abandoned Celtic-tiger era hoarding. The old graveyard is surrounded by half-built apartments, hemmed in by spray-painted chipboard hoarding that has buckled by persistent rain. Leafless tress cast skeletal shadows on the pavement beneath. The boys are feinting towards me now, jumping in and then dodging back. My small assailant continues what has quickly become a litany of threats.

“Gis yer bag or I’ll fuckin kill ya ya fuckin bitch!”

But I can tell that the rest of the boys are getting bored now. Their telepathic formation has loosened.

Some have crossed the road and are staring at the Esso Station, its neon temple promising shelter, distracted shop workers and the potential to fuck about with the air pump. I turn to the boy who still clutches my bag.

He’s trying to loosen the clasp now, but the mechanism has him flummoxed. “I think it would suit you,” I say, “but do you not think it looks better on me?”

“Hahaha ya queer,” the boys hoot at my mugger, and then, when he still refuses to let go of my handbag, “D’ya fancy her or somethin?

Ya fuckin queer.” His face scrunches, turns red. Guilt ripples through me, but I’m tired. All I want to do is get my shopping home so I can make my bland pasta dinner. And the boy’s full weight tugging on my shoulder is sending a shooting pain up my neck and into my skull. As we cross the Luke Kelly Bridge, more of the boys break off and head into the Poplar Row Flats.

The old flats back onto the Tolka.

Sometime recently a playground was installed, but crossing the bridge all you can glimpse is the top of the slide through the barred windows on the viewing platform.

It looks like a prison, though sometimes, when the weather is better and the river not so swollen with melt water, herons and egrets pick their way across the shingle islands.

As we reach the corner, the last of the boys run full tilt down Poplar Row, towards Fairview Park and

East Wall. I drag my mugger across the road, past the Clonliffe House, then on past Molly’s Bar. He’s gone completely quiet now. “Do you not want to go with your friends?” He scowls and says nothing.

As we pass Molly’s, a pickled looking man stands in the pub door, smoking. It strikes me that to him, we probably look like a mother and her son, mid-argument. “Where are you going?” I ask the kid, “Is this your way home?” We’re standing at the pedestrian crossing opposite my house now. An elderly woman closes a front door and comes to a stop beside us. She peers openly into my face. A dirt bike with two kids on it roars past us, and veers onto Bayview Avenue. My mugger takes off after it at full tilt and disappears round the corner. I massage my aching shoulder.

“That your young fella?”

“No,” I say and smile. The woman seems to expect more in the way of conversation, and follows my gaze to the bouquets of flowers taped to the traffic light.

past few years, dirt bikes have been a popular Christmas gift for kids – mostly young teenagers, but for younger kids too. Sometimes you even see the odd quad bike, barreling down the main road in heavy traffic.

On Christmas Day 2013, nineteenyear-old Leroy Coyle crashed his bike into a car parked right beside these traffic lights and died instantly. He was only a few metres from his home. The bike he was riding had already been crashed earlier that day by a twenty year old on Sheriff Street. You can get a 50cc dirt bike with a top speed of 40km per hour for around 220 euro from Dublin-based companies that advertise online. These models are recommended for five to ten year olds. The bigger 150cc models are much more expensive, and can reach speeds of 95km per hour, although 40km per hour is enough to kill you in a head-on collision with a parked vehicle. As the months crawl sluggishly towards Christmas, the bikes are gathering again at the crossroads and in the avenues, their drone a constant background noise in the long evenings.

“Them bikes is lethal,” she says, “that’s where that boy died on “I wonder who puts the flowers Christmas Day.” there?” I ask. Fresh ones are left at least once a week, and now, in the She’s talking about the annual run up to the first anniversary, there Christmas races that take place all are at least ten bouquets: the traffic around the north inner city: Sheriff light has taken on the appearance of Street, Ballybough, North Strand, a sodden maypole.

Seville Place, East Wall. For the

The woman doesn’t answer, instead points towards Summerhill Parade.

“That young fella used to be able to pull a wheelie from the canal bridge all the way down here. I seen him do it.” She draws a line with her finger to the railway bridge that splits the row of cottages in which I live.

“Ha. Yeah.” I say. It’s easier than telling her I’m named for my Finglas granny (Jane, but Jessie to her friends) who died the year I was born.

I’m opening my front door now, but the woman has a parting shot: “Is the son still at home – Imelda’s?” she asks, the pinched quality of the “Yeah?” gossip-seeker creeping into her “Day he died he only made it half tone, “Still not married?” that far. A good lad,” she says, “but “Dunno!” I say brightly, and close them bikes is fuckin’ lethal.” the door behind me. I’m not about The light changes and we cross the to start speculating, but a memory comes to me of Imelda standing in road. I stop outside my gate. her doorway the previous summer, “You live here?” She looks over my watching the world go by: shoulder at the front door. “Is Im“Them gays is fierce selfish, Jenelda still next door?” nifer,” she had said to me as I came “She is,” I say, “but she’s not the best through the gate. “Fierce selfish.” now.”

I still don’t know why this should “Ooooh you shoulda seen her in be, but since that summer Imelher prime,” says the woman, “long da has been making the slow slide blonde hair on her. Fellas loved her.” towards dementia. Her calling me

by Jennifer, her deceased daugh“Right,” I say, trying to picture Im- ter’s name, seems to be a symptom elda, with her permanently installed of this. rollers, as some sort of Ballybough By the time I get into the house femme fatale. and dump my shopping, I realise “And what’s your name?” the wom- there’s no time to eat. I have to head back into town for a work event. an asks.

As I leave the house again, the sky is a cold haze of sodium light. The “Jessica.” group of kids has reformed. They’re “Jessica?” she cackles, “Oh that’s standing on the suicide plot on the a real soap name. Your Ma musta’ corner of Clonliffe and Ballybough Road. According to local historiloved the soaps.”

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ans, the city’s suicides were buried at this crossroads in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the area was little more than a tidal flood plain populated by thieves and prostitutes and shut off from the rest of the city at nightfall by a fortified gate. It’s also claimed that the area inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a notion I dismissed until I read about the practice of burying suicides at crossroads, with a stake through the heart – to pin the dead to the earth, so their spirits couldn’t wander.

Now the area is a broken tarmac half-moon in front of a row of billboards. Concrete plant tubs stand dotted between two metal benches, their paint peeling. There’s nothing to mark what the place once was. A local politician is campaigning for a plaque. In summer, the GAA park their ticket vans there.

I pause for a moment to watch the boys, puzzled. They’re standing in an oddly neat row, as if waiting for a bus. But it’s starting to rain heavily now, so I make my way away from the kids and cut through Charleville Avenue and its hodge-podge of houses. From behind me, the howl of another dirt bike ricochets back and forth between their facades.

I look up to see my would-be mugger balanced on its saddle along with another kid. They pass me, almost taking flight on a ramp, turn and pass again, back to what I now 043

realise is a queue for turns up at the suicide plot. I smile at the kid as he passes, but I can’t see his expression – his face is a dark knot in the shadows between the street lamps.

Jessica Traynor is a writer based in the North Strand

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THE RISE OF IRISH WHISKEY / 46 NOTES FROM A REDEMPTION / 56 THE VINYL KING OF EAST WALL / 68 THE LAST NAZI / 78 THE LIBERTIES REMEMBERED / 88 THE BIRD MARKET / 100

The Dingle Whiskey Bar is not what I expected. It is not dank, or licentious, or grotty. It doesn’t have that air of energised desperation I didn’t quite realise I was expecting – some hazy clichéd idea I picked up without realising it, the product of background noise: Jim Morrison, Bertolt Brecht, Janis Joplin, Phil Lynott. But this place, a new bar on Nassau Street – connected to its neighbour, the Porterhouse – has none of that seedy incoherence.

On the contrary, on a Tuesday evening in December, the clientele seem all too possessed of their senses.

The room is long and narrow, with the bar along one side, around which is gathered a large group of businesspeople, mainly men, mainly in their fifties, blocking the way through. They seem to be here for a whiskey tasting. Dingle Whiskey is one of a new breed of small distilleries to have opened in Ireland in the past two years. Based in Dingle, unsurprisingly, they were founded by the man behind the Porterhouse franchise, Oliver Hughes, so they have been able to refit this bar, which, until a few months ago, was an undifferentiated part of the pub next door.

ONE FOR THE ROAD THE RISE OF IRISH WHISKEY

Dingle Whiskey, and the Porterhouse, are attempting to capitalise on a boom in Irish whiskey. I’ve spoken to a number of people in the business over the past few weeks, all of whom point to an exponential rise in sales figures over recent years

for Jameson, the biggest Irish brand name in the industry. Their sales are increasing every year – with a 7.5 per cent average growth rate from 2002-12. This success is the fruit of twenty years of careful branding work, with most of the growth taking place in the US and South Africa.

Jameson is now one of the most popular shots in the States, even sporting its own grotesque off-shoot, the Pickleback: a shot of Jameson followed by a shot of pickle brine.

Distilleries like those in Dingle are trying to provide something different, something artisanal: craft whiskeys, produced in smaller, more carefully overseen batches. They are aiming to revive what they see as a lost tradition in Ireland. Surprisingly, they are doing so with the support of the big names, Jameson, Cooley, Powers, who have dominated whiskey production in Ireland for decades. It is in their interests too, after all, to ‘build the category,’ a strange, PR-inflected turn of phrase, but such is the jargon of the field. And if they are seeking industrial legacies to revive – whether for their inherent value or their value as good copy – Dublin has them in droves.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, small distilleries were littered across Dublin, though they tended to cluster around the canals, where grain entered the city and where there were plentiful supplies of water. Hence there were three notable clusters in Smithfield, the the

Docklands, and the Liberties, the site of what was known as the Golden Triangle, where the main branch of the Grand Canal used to terminate at a harbour (long-since filled in) bordering with the Guinness brewery. The curved Grand Canal building still stands, dilapidated but intact, just off James’s St. Ireland was the premier whiskey producer in the world in the late nineteenth century, an industrial inheritance which the new distillers plan to make the most of. The Dublin Whiskey Company is one of a number of nascent enterprises that seem to be racing to establish their distilleries (and, importantly, their visitor centres) in the Liberties this year. Alltech, a Kentuckybased animal nutrition company, has also announced plans to invest 5 million euro in converting St James’s Church into a working distillery. And Teeling Whiskey has invested 10 million euro in creating a functional distillery on Newmarket Square, which should be operational – and open to the public – by the time this article is published.

promise of any immediate return.

They represent a serious investment; you might even say a serious gamble.

Where is the money coming from?

Teeling Whiskey is an interesting case. Jack Teeling is the son of John Teeling, a diamond magnate and whiskey expert, recently described in the Irish Independent – with no discernible trace of irony – as ‘a shark, a winner, 24-carat alpha.’

Teeling Snr bought the historic distillery at Cooley in 1987. (The family connection goes farther back too, as Jack tells me when we speak over the phone. His ancestor Walter Teeling set up a distillery on nearby Marrowbone Lane in 1782.) Teeling Snr spent twenty years cultivating the business, watching the fortunes of Irish whiskey gradually recover, before selling it to drinks conglomerate Beam for 73 million euro in December, 2011, a date which has already become a defining point in the story of the industry. It is this money which has enabled his son Jack to establish Teeling Whiskey, and in the process, bringing the first new pot stills into Dublin, as Mind you, all this activity might he proudly informs me, in 125 years. seem a little premature. Legally, it takes three years before a distilled I take my seat at the quietest corliquid can be classified as whiskey; ner of the bar and ask for a Dingle and in reality, of course, it takes Whiskey. The barman – complete much longer to produce the special with beard, waistcoat and noseeight- and twelve-year whiskeys on ring – nods significantly upon which much of the high-end trade hearing my order, and points to is founded. Each of these whis- the man beside me, with whom key outfits requires, as such, a sig- he has been deep in discussion. nificant outlay of capital without “This man is from the distillery,” he 048

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tells me. “You’ll be drinking whiskey made with those hands there.” “Well now,” says the distiller, gently correcting him, “that’s not strictly true.”

Due to the three-year classificatory regulations, the whiskeys currently being traded by companies such as Dingle and Teeling are not their own distilled liquids. The first batch of their own liquid won’t be ready for another year at least. For now, they can only work with finishes on liquids distilled elsewhere.

Or, as Dingle have been doing quite successfully, they can supplement their stock with gins and vodkas, which can be prepared and bottled in a matter of weeks. Tonight, he tells me, they are launching a drink called An Cliabhan, their first blend, not technically whiskey. He is occupied in preparing for the launch, so I don’t get to talk to him long enough to ask the question at the forefront of my mind. They have no liquid of their own, and yet they’ve already opened a whiskey bar?

The long corridor of a room has been clad with barrel wood, forming a fake curve so that the place resembles a cave. Wine glasses hang upside down above the bar. They are playing light jazz.

Along the shelves behind the bar, interspersing the wall of whiskey, are glasses of coffee beans. Their astringency helps to clear the palate between drinks, apparently. I have to say, a bit of Janis Joplin might help to liven things up in here.

But of course that’s an association the new whiskey producers want to escape. Whiskey is a terribly loaded drink in Ireland, with its own folklore, its connotations of savage drunkenness. I remember growing up, how you would hear about such and such a man who took to the whiskey and went downhill.

These were the famed whiskey drinkers, red-nosed, watery-eyed, who you’d know from the town.

I remember in the weeks after his mother – my grandmother – died, almost five years ago now, my father was disconsolate. He didn’t talk much about it. He just seemed to mope a little. He had recently turned fifty. I remember my stepmother telling me about the shoulder of whiskey she had found in the glove compartment of his jeep.

She never told him she’d found it. Tacitly we agreed to leave him the liberty of his grief. He would never normally touch whiskey, but during that time he took to it with enthusiasm. Only a few weeks later he suffered a massive stroke. We were told, in the hospital, he might not live. We didn’t need to worry about the whiskey again after that.

Irish whiskey is seen as a drink of extremes. Its associations are wildness and ruin: a drink for mourning.

How different seems the carefully calibrated scotch. Scottish whiskey took off in the 1890s, after the wide adoption of a newly patented still, developed, ironically enough,

by an Irishman, Aeneas Coffey.

Throughout the twentieth century they remained the worldleaders in whiskey production, while the Irish industry dwindled.

I spent two summers in my twenties working weekends at a wedding bar on the Isle of Wight. Landguard Manor was a family-run business, and I remember very clearly the phials of single malt scotch that lined the shelves in the family home which occupied one wing of the old house. Shelves of them, littered, not ordered. The father of the family used to take – probably still takes – a few trips every year up to the Highlands, to spend days taking photographs and visiting tiny, choice distilleries, from which he’d return with small, and I can only imagine, inordinately expensive amounts of scotch. Did they come in phials? Or did he transfer them himself? Maybe he brought the phials along with him. Though at that price, I suppose a phial wouldn’t be too much to ask. I remember being impressed, envious, and at the same time baffled – I still am – at the sheer economics of taste they represented.

Whisky Magazine. For him, the differences between Scottish and Irish whiskey production are there to be capitalised upon, not corrected.

Scotch is successful in part because it has been so protectively regulated. While all regulations have been introduced in the interests of safeguarding the identity and integrity of the product, and preventing unscrupulous producers, they can have the additional effect of discouraging experimentation.

Foggarty believes Ireland is in a good position because it is currently not so heavily regulated, allowing for a certain amount of freedom for producers. He would like to see distillers being able to produce small batches, experiment with different finishes, incorporate new materials for stills and barrels. Of course an unregulated free-for-all would be dangerous, and the Irish Whiskey Association was established last year to monitor the new crop of distillers and to ensure the high quality of all whiskey purporting to be Irish.

Foggarty believes part of the role of this organisation should be to convince legislators of the value This is not something the new craft of enabling experimentation, and whiskey producers in Ireland seem finding a way to strike that balance. keen to emulate either. They don’t want to get bogged down in speci- “Irish whiskey should be open. It ality. I spoke to Michael Foggarty, should be creative, inventive, exone of the owners of L. Mulligan ploratory. And in the same way, any Grocer gastropub in Stoneybatter, government assistance should be who was recently recognised with open too. This is going to be cruan ambassadorial accolade from cial. It shouldn’t be restrictive. This 052

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is the biggest advantage we have.”

His blueprint of an open, craftbased, entrepreneur-driven industry is certainly an exciting prospect. And Dublin could be at the forefront of it, if the cards are played right. But mightn’t the bigger whiskey brands feel inclined to favour a more restrictive approach?

“Not at all. There’s great solidarity in the industry at the moment. What do they say?

A rising tide floats all boats.”

I finish my drink at the Dingle Whiskey Bar and don’t order another. Instead I make way toward the Liffey, along College Green, to the Palace Bar, one of the best whiskey bars in Ireland according to the recent Irish Whiskey Awards. It is also one of Dublin’s most famous literary pubs. During its golden age in the 1950s it was the haunt of Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan (when not barred), and R.M. Smyllie, the rotund and much-esteemed editor of The Irish Times from 1934-54.

Probably less famously, it has also been a de facto Tipperary pub since the early 1900s, in the ownership of the Ryans originally, and the Ahernes since 1946. My mother and father – both from Tipp originally, North and South, Nenagh and Clonmel – drank here thirty years ago.

It remains a curious relic. The first impression I have, upon stepping inside on a Tuesday night, is of a cavernous emptiness. There are people here – they are lining the long,

mahogany Victorian bar – but the place feels strangely unoccupied.

There is no music playing. There are no overtures to the twenty-first century, unless you count the wall of almost exclusively Irish – and a lot of it craft – whiskey behind the bar.

Other than that, this pub has not changed much since my mother and father drank here, before – and let’s be honest, after – I was born.

Even the barman from whom I order my glass of Teeling Single Grain is from Tipp. The bar is populated by a row of garrulous regulars, so I take my drink into the brightly lit, oppressively overheated back room, with its high ceiling, its beautiful ornate skylight surrounded by decorative stained glass, its framed prints and statuettes of Beckett, Behan, Flann O’Brien.

This room, too, can hardly have changed since my parents’ days. My father didn’t die that night in the hospital. He survived the stroke, and lived four more years. He died six months ago. It is hard not to think of him, sitting in this pub, drinking whiskey, the same way he took to whiskey after his own mother’s death. It is hard not to feel I am repeating him. The associations are not so easy to shake off.

But the truth is, I am not the target market. Ireland is already at capacity. We actually cannot consume any more alcohol than we already do. The new distillers have their eye

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on international markets in China, Japan, Africa and the Americas.

Their aspirations are global. They have whole new sets of associations to forge. For better or worse, whiskey is already woven as deeply as it can be into the very grain of our lives.

Whatever happens, we will carry on drinking the stuff, craft or otherwise, replicating our parents’ habits, repeating our parents’ mistakes.

I leave the Palace after the one, met with a Temple Bar that is already two-thirds of the way to debauchery, and make my way home.

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Nathan O’Donnell is a writer based in Stoneybatter

NOTES FROM A REDE MPTION

PHOTOS BY DONAL MOLONEY

The first day, Tony got up extra early.

His stomach felt fluttery as he pulled on the fresh clothes he’d carefully washed and ironed the day before. By 6.45am, he was out the hostel door.

and there he was, one late-November morning, on his way to the first day of his first job in a long time. But would he be able to hold it down, get back on his feet?

It was still dark as he hopped on the bus, and then the Luas, his jacket zipped up, his hat pulled down over his curly golden hair. As the greenline train snaked through the inner city and turned its nose southwards, Tony had that new-job feeling, the blurry anticipation you get when you think you know the outline of the future but none of the details.

As Tony stepped off the Luas at the edge of the Sandyford Industrial Estate, he looked around at what seemed to be half-built apartments and a closed Aldi. He looked at the blue-biro directions on a scrap of paper. He’d never been here before.

Where was he supposed to go? ***

He wondered what he would be doing. He wondered if his co-workers would like him. If they would even speak English and understand him.

And would they judge him?

Over the past few years, as Dublin dragged itself through the funk of recession, Tony O’Brien has been a beacon of cheerfulness in the south inner-city, sat between the Camden Halal grocery store and Fontana Cafe Would they judge him? For the pre- on Lower Camden Street. vious three years, Tony had been sat on the pavement on Lower Camden With warm blue eyes and a rakish Street greeting passersby, holding out smile, he has the tousled looks of a a raggedy cardboard cup for change. surfer and an easy, familiar manner.

Just days earlier, he’d been a beggar.

From her stall, metres away from Tony’s patch, Marie Duff, a fifthAnd was he ready? The twenty-five generation fruit-and-vegetable seller, year old’s resume wasn’t blank. He’d would see him greet all who passed. scored two passes and five honours He was unfailingly polite, she said. in his Leaving Cert. In his late teens, “Even if people didn’t give him monhe’d pulled pints in a trendy Black- ey, he’d say, ‘No problem. Have a nice rock pub. After that, he’d hustled as day!’” an over-the-phone salesman. But that had been years back.

When it was cold out, Tony would ask if she needed a cup of warm tea.

It had happened fast. A photograph. A When she was struggling with a box, Facebook message. A couple of casual he’d offer a hand. If she nipped off on interviews over coffee in Rathmines, an errand, he’d keep a loyal eye on the 058

WOULD THEY JUDGE HIM FOR HIS THREE YEARS ON THE STREET?

stall. “I was only hoping and praying streets, and around again, hoping for that he wouldn’t end up on the wrong his name to edge up the years-long track,” she said. social-housing list. He sat on Lower Camden Street, clasping a cup, chatMany of those who passed by Marie ting to passersby, a ready smile on his and Tony’s stretch of the street strug- face, waiting for his life to start again. gled to understand how he had ended up there. What, they wondered, had *** gone wrong?

That first day, Tony didn’t risk beIt’s hard to know when the tailspin ing late. After he got off the Luas, he started. Perhaps, it was the sum- jumped into a warm taxi and smallmer day when nine-year-old Tony talked with the driver during the watched as his mother collapsed and minutes-long ride, admired the leathdied on the street in front of him. er seats, told him about his new job.

When they puttered to a stop in front Perhaps, it was the night he had a of a squat building, and Tony tried to huge argument with his foster father hand him a fiver, he wouldn’t take it. and was too stubborn to go back and “The taxi driver said, ‘It’s okay. Keep so went into a boys’ home and then it.’ So he had brought me there for another, called Home Again. “I was nothing.” seventeen and I thought I knew everything,” he says. “But if I knew what Tony’s first task was to stuff thousands I know now, I would have ran back.” of bills into thousands of envelopes, then put the thousands of envelopes Perhaps, it was when he lost his first into boxes. It was something he knew private-rental flat. Because, he says, he could do, but it was mind-numb“I was just too young. I’d never had a ing and monotonous. The morning flat on my own. It was just like a party dragged. He couldn’t stop looking at house.” The landlord kicked him out. the clock. 10.55am. 11.02am.

Perhaps, it was when his two-year contract for a phone company came to an end. And in his early twenties, he joined the ranks of the unemployed.

And he handed out hundreds of CVs, but got one interview that led to another interview and then to nothing.

And so, after a year, he just gave up.

When Tony stepped out for his cigarette break, he faced his colleagues for the first time. It was the usual firstencounter queries: about names, and origins, and job agencies. They were grand, Tony thought. But he glossed over how he’d got the job. How he’d been sat on the pavement when local photographer Donal Moloney He bounced around from friends’ dropped by, asked if he’d be part of houses to hostels, to sofas, to the a project. Donal has a portfolio that 061

stretches from shots of pop-rock legend Sinéad O’Connor to adverts for Batchelors Peas. He also has a sideline project, amassing sharp, focused portraits and videos of those who panhandle in Dublin’s doorways or sleep under the city’s bridges.

sprouted around the country.

In 2013, Dublin Simon Community helped 325 people through its learning and development courses; thirteen people started its ‘work ready’ scheme. That same year, Focus Ireland helped 230 people learn new But he’d put off taking Tony’s picture. skills and build self-belief, to help “It just seemed like it was too simple them move on to training, or jobs, or to just interview him because I pass go back to school. him everyday and he’s only literally down the road,” he said later. “In But there are hurdles that make it a the back of my head, I was thinking struggle for the homeless to find, or I would interview him some day, but keep, a job. Some struggle with addicnot until I’ve got to the underbelly tion, or mental health problems. Othof the city first, and then I can come ers haven’t finished school, or have back to him.” rough-and-ready social skills, or unstable personal lives.

One Sunday afternoon, on November 9th, he did come back to him and ten Drumming up motivation is also days later, he posted Tony’s photo on tough, says Kieran Vulker who runs Facebook. “I don’t think I have ever Focus Ireland’s educational wing. met a more chatty, pleasant and polite “People’s situations really do bring young homeless guy like him before,” them down.” he wrote.

In a way, Tony had skirted many of The Facebook comments had come these problems. He had a private fast. Some commented on how hand- room in a hostel on a dry corridor, some Tony looked in the portrait. away from the “screaming and bangOthers said they’d seen him on the ing and mad noises” of the lower street, recalled how mannerly he was. floors. He’d given up drink after his Then, at 5.47pm, came the post that brother died. He’d dabbled with had the potential to change Tony’s drugs in his youth, he said, but never life: “Donal… Can you contact him as come close to an addiction himself – I would like to offer him a job now.” unless you count the time a guy held a syringe to his throat in a hostel toilet. *** “He’s very strong-minded,” said his As agencies grapple with how to help uncle, Christy Flanagan. “In a sense, the homeless move on for good, edu- he was able to decide that’s not going cation and employment courses have to happen to me. He’s strong-willed.”

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HOW WAS HE GOING TO PAY TO GET TO WORK, TO BUY FOOD OR A HOSTEL? 064

Even so, when he learned Tony had a job, Christy was worried about him handling the early rising, and he rallied and began to call Tony at 7am every morning to give him a nudge to get up.

Tony also knew it was going to be tough and not just because of the new routine. He couldn’t sit on the street during the day. So how was he going to pay to get to work? Buy lunch?

Cover the hostel rates? How, he wondered, was he going to get through to his first pay cheque?

be headed home. But Tony had to stay.

Perhaps for another hour, perhaps for another three. It all depended on who passed by, how much they donated.

Back before he got the job, he’d usually aim for 20 quid a day. That would cover the hostel if he was staying there, a bit of food, and some smokes if he had run out. He didn’t always get it, and sometimes he’d eat at a friend’s house, or go around the corner to Credo, an Italian place, where staff would leave out pizza on a green bench when they closed up. Sometimes, he just wouldn’t eat.

*** Six days after he started work, Tony sat in his usual spot on Lower Camden Street, on top of a folded cardboard box, back against a metal shutter, cup in hand.

Over the previous three years, he’d learnt that it’s never easy to tell who is going to stop and give money. He still remembered one woman who’d approached him, startled him with a blitz of abuse, and then handed over a tenner. He’d always assumed it would be the ones who stopped to talk the most who’d give the most, but then there was one guy who barely said a word, yet gave him five euros every time he passed.

It was a biting-cold Tuesday night.

The sky was dark and the stars were hard and bright. Those who passed, hurried with purpose, leaving clouds of breath in the air. A black-jacketed man with a newspaper tucked in his pocket. A young guy with a red back- If anybody gave him trouble, it was pack strapped tight to his back. usually young lads. A couple of years earlier, some drunk guys had stagA woman schlepped past pushing a gered up to him and one of them had vegetable cart towards storage, the given him a box for no reason at all. metallic rumble echoing down the It had been tough going back to sit street. A large orange dropped to the there, after that. Every now and then, pavement and rolled towards Tony. he shook the cup, totting up the coins “Rosie!” he called, holding out the that jumped and jangled in the botfruit. “Thank you,” she said, stooping tom. down for it, before continuing on.

It was 6pm, and everybody seemed to His new job was going well. But the 065

money he’d pulled together from well-wishers – full disclosure: myself included – to cover the basics of life had quickly run out. So, when he finished work in Sandyford, he hopped the Luas back to Lower Camden Street, and pitched up for the evening. The long days were exhausting.

He wasn’t used to manual labour. His back ached. He felt down, burnt out, and had begun to wonder if he could hack it.

boss, to tell him he hadn’t a penny, to see if he could work something out.

His boss started to loan him money, Tony said. Small instalments. Euro 100. Euro 70. Euro 50. Some days, Tony would still go to sit on Lower Camden Street for a top-up. But, gradually, he felt more secure.

wanted to see Tony in his office, he said. First thing, he said. Tony felt uneasy. Was it, he wondered, because of his smoke breaks? He’d been taking quite a few. Maybe, he’d been taking too many, he thought. Maybe, they thought he wasn’t pulling his weight. ***

When he strolled into work in the mornings, he knew exactly where to go, what to do. He’d gulp down a cup of coffee, chat with the lads in the canteen, slip out for a quick cigarette break and then to work. In the second week, his boss reassigned him to another site and Tony settled into another new routine. He started to learn to drive a forklift to move around towers of pallets, and marvelled at the size of the machinery. Sure, there was grunt work, like sweeping, or unpacking hundreds of artificial Christmas trees from a shipping container and sludging through the rain to dump them in a skip, but he never thought to quit. “I was just thinking about getting it finished,” he said.

A little before 3pm on January 3rd, the first Saturday after New Year’s, Lower Camden Street had begun to wake up. The blue and black and grey store shutters had lifted. Locals strolled in and out of second-hand shops, and cafes, and grocers. Christmas shopping had ceded to the routine errands.

Tony already knew that his first pay cheque was imminent. He’d checked his bank account and the balance had shot up from nothing to 1,600 Euros.

His card didn’t seem to work yet so he couldn’t access it, but the money was there. Enough for food. Enough for Luas fare. Or the start of savings for a deposit on a flat.

Sometimes, people would ask Tony what he was up to, and it felt good to be able to tell them he was just off to work, or just back from work. He liked the talk at the warehouse. It wasn’t drink and drugs and prison. It He had handed over his lunch money, felt grown-up. “A different world,” he been written up for a fine, and felt the called it. He thanked his boss so many pack of passengers turn towards him. times that his boss had to plead with “They just stared,” he said. “It was him to stop. embarrassing. It was just really embarrassing.”

On December 17th, as Tony made his The next day, Tony went to talk to his way to work, his boss called him. He

But he’d wanted to spend some of the Saturday there, to make sure everybody knew he was okay, and to tell them why his patch would be empty.

There were crowds of people he’d seen day in and day out over the last few years, who he knew by personal tragedies and triumphs as much as by name: the woman whose sister died on Christmas day, the woman whose The sky was clear but it was damp daughter’s friend had a baby, the guy down on the pavement, where, as who proposed to his girlfriend on a he had done for thousands of hours, bridge.

Tony sat and nodded and chatted to passersby, a plastic coke bottle beside Earlier, an elderly woman had run up him, a cardboard cup in his hands. to him and hugged him, tears in her eyes. She hadn’t seen him for a few When he had gone back into his boss’s days. She had thought he was dead. office that December morning, the Tony didn’t want people to think he boss had handed him a thick docu- was dead. ment and told him to take it away and give it a good read, he said. Tony had “I really want to say goodbye to peotried to sneak looks at it at work. He ple today. I’ll drop back in and stuff. had carried it home and read it over But I’ll just be around,” he said, claspthe next few days. ing his paper cup. “I just won’t be doing this.

He had brought it back after the weekend – a signed contract. Unless he did something seriously bad, for the next two years, he was employed.

Lois Kapila is a writer His years in limbo seemed over. based in The Coombe Sat on the pavement on 3 January,

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“I got fined on the Luas,” he said, his voice breaking.

That morning, he had skimped on travel costs to save money for lunch.

He’d stood on the Luas, gripped the circular rail and watched with a sinking feeling as the orange-capped ticket collector moved down the aisle, calling out: “Tickets, please!”

He had peered out of the window, trying to work out when the next stop was, hoping it was now, or now, or now. Just as the train drew into the station, the guy had reached him.

“I told him. I even told him I was homeless and living in a hostel. But he said: ‘And you’re going to work?

Nah, sorry mate,’” Tony recalled.

the vinyl king of the east wall

Sound travels so light, I forget that it travels. I hear recordings as originating from inside myself. In reality, the sound has been strummed, amplified, equalised, compressed, downloaded, uploaded, and re-emoted through my headphones. Most music, like starlight, reaches me at a far remove from its origin.

Aidan Foley receives music halfway through the ether, after it has been mixed and before it goes on the radio.

He masters it. He is slight, active, and attuned to his environment by trade.

In his studio, Masterlabs, he listens through speakers that are so critical, they sound not nice but true. He alters range, frequency, and harmonics, enhancing sound as a film grader would enrich colour. He moves the music until it moves him. “Yeah. There we go,” he says, tapping his foot. “It’s got some motion, and a bit of swagger.”

The first stereo recordings Aidan heard were his father’s Irish rebel albums. Des Foley left Tipperary at eighteen to work on the railways in Zimbabwe, what was then Southern Rhodesia. The plane ride took three days with seven layovers. He carried his albums with him and played them on a turntable, years later, as his son was growing up. Aidan couldn’t believe that one sound came from one speaker, while simultaneously, another sound came from a second speaker, both playing the same song.

He took apart the turntable to see how it worked. Sanctions prevented imports into the country. To come by new things, one had to repurpose old things. Musicians wound elec-

tric wire around Bic pens, to keep for guitar string, and they played on the unwound, corrugated wire. If a string broke, the player knotted it and played around the knot. No more than several drum sets could be found across the country, so when Aidan decided to play the drums, he saved his pocket money and bought the set that belonged to the US ambassador’s son. It cost Aidan three hundred Zimbabwe dollars — in his father’s opinion, a waste. At fourteen Aidan brought a demo of his band’s music to Gramma Records, a factory outside of Harare. Gramma Records was not interested in the demo, but the equipment there mesmerised Aidan. He offered to hire out his drum set in exchange for work as a studio assistant.

The manager said okay. Aidan could hit play and stop, but not record.

In East Wall, Aidan operates a kingdom of knobs and switches. He has lived in Dublin since he came for a wedding in 1989 and never left. He plays me a Christmas song. It sounds pretty good. Then he switches to the mastered version. By comparison, the first version suddenly becomes hollow and distant, as if it was playing three doors down. The mastered version sounds rich and close. It is ready to be transferred to a disk. The master disk is the prototype from which every other disk will be cut.

Music incarnates on this round piece of wax via cutting amplifiers. They amplify the sound from the computer to hundreds of watts, which push a piston instead of pushing air (as we normally hear music). The piston

mechanically etches onto the wax.

Marie, the cutting engineer, looks through a microscope at the cut that spirals from the outside to the inside of the disk. All the nuances of a piece of music take form in this fine incision, one three-thousandth of an inch deep. The grooves do not run parallel. They wiggle. The stylus on a record player runs in the groove and vibrates according to the shape of the wiggle. The vibrations translate to music. Marie watched Aidan use the equipment for six months before she touched it. A mote of dust in a groove disturbs the contours and, as a result, the music. So she works precisely. At the end of a side, she cuts a solid lock groove, a full circle that describes an infinite loop of silence. By hand, she etches the catalogue number and her initials into the wax. The first map of sound is complete. It’s ready for the factory.

Record manufacture became obsolete in 1982, the year CDs usurped vinyl. A CD could not encode as much detail as a record. Its sound was not as rich, but the CD was convenient, and as often happens, convenience trumped quality. Record factories were converted to CD factories. The machines that made records were dismantled. They grew popular again with the mp3 file. People who wanted convenience bought mp3s instead of CDs. People who wanted a high quality of sound looked back to vinyl. CDs descended into mediocrity, while record sales have increased by a hundred per cent every six months since 2006. The record factories did

not make such a comeback. Now fewer than twenty factories across the world make records, and until last year, none of them were in Ireland. Aidan sent his master disks to Germany or Czechoslavakia for mass production. After twenty-five years of shipping disks to Eastern Europe and building bicycles in his yard, Aidan thought, why not do something mechanical and build a record factory?

The reasons were obvious. No one has manufactured a pressing machine since 1982. If you want to buy a new one, you can’t. If you find an old one, it costs a quarter of a million euros.

The equipment to make records can’t be bought, and reinventing the vinyl wheel is not commercially viable.

Aidan returned to Zimbabwe. CD manufacturing never took hold in that economy. The old Gramma factory equipment had been locked in a shed beside what was now a water distillery. Aidan found someone to open the shed on a Saturday. A time capsule of rusted machinery lay inside, stockpiled up, in pieces. Aidan bought the pieces for scrap price and had them shipped back to Ireland.

He found premises in a former soap factory in East Wall. The building was condemned, and the door was boarded up. Even the landlord couldn’t enter. Aidan propped a ladder against the outer wall, climbed up to the hatch window, and jumped in. He landed on bird droppings piled halfway to the roof. From inside, he cut the door in half. He attacked the droppings with a spade and a forklift.

He installed water, electricity, win-

dows, doors, and a boiler. He cut and fit pipes to siphon heat from the boiler to the next room.

Next door, for nine months, he and his factory manager Alan restored the old machines. They looked at the broken parts and asked what each was supposed to do. What happens to that part when this part moves? Where does the lightbulb go? The machines came with no manuals. Restoring them was like trying to recover a lost language without any surviving speakers, written records, or dictionaries. Three weeks were spent cleaning rust from the record-former, because scraping it would create a dent.

It didn’t work right side up, so Aidan and Alan turned it upside down. They attached a car jack to it. They experimented with different concentrations of metals. They adjusted the timing of the electroplating until it was just right. “I’m a bit mad you know,” Aidan said. “I’ll be lashing around, unpacking, doing all this stuff, and I told one of my workers, just get the forklift. He’s like, I don’t have a forklift license. I was like, I don’t have a license for anything! I just learn it, and do it!

Do it safely!”

The factory resembles a print shop, with machines set up around the perimeter. Here, the master disk etched by Marie becomes a metal mould, a negative of the record. Its grooves point upwards, and this surface, too, must remain pristine, an imperative that approaches a paradox: turn wax to metal, but don’t touch the wax. “Or even breathe on it,” Aidan adds. “Or even look at it.”

Making the metal takes two hours.

The wax is cleaned with saporin, a Japanese bark, and chromic acid to remove dust. A sprinkling of tin hardens the wax, followed by coatings of silver, titanium, and nickel.

Alan drills a hole in the centre. He scrapes the edge with a razor blade, then sands the edges and the middle.

With a trimmer machine, he trims the outer edge of the mould, as if opening a can of baked beans.

When the mould is complete, he fits it into the presser machine. He could press a record ten thousand times, though typically, orders come from local record companies in the magnitude of hundreds. Hundreds of times, he places a vinyl puck, the weight of a record, onto the centre of the mould. He tops the puck with a label, dried in a toaster oven, and closes the machine. Steam at 180 degrees enters from the boiler room. 140 tonnes of hydraulic pressure squeeze the puck to a pancake. 22 litres of water cool it. Eight seconds later, Alan opens the machine and removes a record. Aidan is, as far as he knows, the only person in the world who can make a record from start to finish. “If you send me your song in the morning, I can master it, cut it, plate it, press it, and hand you a record all in one day.” He passes me the product.

Each side holds twenty-two minutes of music. Hours ago they were vibrations. Now they weigh something in my hands. I run my finger over the spiraling groove, a thumbprint of sound, the echo of a touch.

074

Lily Akerman is a writer based in The Coombe

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Dublin in 1940 was a strange place.

It was the bleak capital of one of the few neutral states in war-torn Europe, with food, gas, electricity and petrol rationed. The glimmer man was making his rounds, and a collection point for turf, the main fuel of wartime Ireland, was established in Phoenix Park. It was also a place swarming with German spies, often supported by the IRA and other Irish republicans.

Given Ireland’s location, the Allies, and the British in particular, were keen to establish a foothold in the Republic, or even have Ireland join their side. Éamon de Valera and the Irish government opted for neutrality however, which was a gamble: in May 1940, British troops had occupied neutral Iceland to avoid Germany using it as base – and Hitler had designs on Ireland as well. By 1940, the IRA numbered fewer than 1,000 members, many of whom were imprisoned – but those still active applied a policy of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and shared intelligence with the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany. IRA leader Sean Russell had openly gone to Nazi Germany to campaign for support, only to end up dying of a burst gastric ulcer on a U-boat on his journey home.

The stage was set for a 50-year old lawyer readying himself to parachute into County Meath from a rumbling HE-111 bomber. On May 5, 1940, Dr Hermann Goertz jumped.

Goertz was a flamboyant character who had decided that espionage was his vocation. A lawyer by trade, and from a moneyed background, he had fought in World War 1 and travelled to England in 1936 under the pretext of book research, only to spy on a RAF-base in Kent. The trip and his espionage activity were all self-financed – he even took his own secretary with him. He was discovered and sentenced to four years in prison. Goertz returned to Germany in 1939 and went straight to the chief of the German secret service, Admiral Canaris, to volunteer for another assignment. His mission was to travel to Ireland and linked up with local IRA representatives to prepare plan Kathleen, the invasion of Northern Ireland.

He was flown over from Occupied France, most likely from an airfield near Brest. On landing in County Meath he lost his radio transmitter and proceeded to Dublin on foot.

The Abwehr had provided him with

British Pounds, which were valid in Ireland at the time, but he did not know this and mostly lived on what the land and the occasional friendly farmer would provide. He marched the entire distance to Dublin, some 80 miles, asking for directions along the way – including at a Garda station in Poulaphouca, where despite wearing full Luftwaffe parade dress he was not detained. Goertz’s decision to wear the uniform stemmed from a mixture of delusion and naivety: he may have assumed the Irish would not recognise his uniform, and if they did, that he would be welcocomed with open arms.

Goertz finally linked up with the IRA in the capital and was moved to a safe house called Villa Konstanz on Templeogue Road, a fine modernist building that must have appealed to Goertz. He had never been to Ireland before, but to him the the grey and downcast city was the perfect playground for his espionage antics for the greater good of the Reich.

He met with Stephen Hayes, Chief of Staff of the IRA while staying at Villa Konstanz (who persuaded him to abandon his uniform), and drafted his first reports to Berlin. Of his stay in Templeogue, Goertz later wrote: “I was treated with true Irish hospitality.”

He was tipped off to the gardai however, and the house was raided soon after he arrived. Goertz got away, but left behind most of his equipment and money and, even worse, all plans for Kathleen. He then made contact

with Dr Eduard Hempel, Germany’s ambassador, and was now assured that had a way to get his reports out, without having to find a new transmitter. However G2, the Irish secret service, intercepted his letters to the embassy and made their own responses. Goertz believed these to be legitimate letters in return from Hempel – G2 even informed Goertz that he had been promoted to major as reward for his activities.

Over the following 18 months Goertz was dragged from pillar to post by the IRA, staying in various locations throughout Dublin. In his reports to Berlin, he maintained that he, and not the IRA, chose these safe-houses, displaying the megalomania that had convinced him that he was the perfect man for the Irish job. In Dublin Goertz had time. While he was writing up reports and holding meetings with the IRA, he also walked around the

areas he was staying in, went to the local pubs and was considered a ladies’ man. Many of the people giving him shelter were widows of men who had died during the Civil War on the anti-treaty side; and he had a string of girlfriends during his time on the run. His list of hiding places read like a crazy German tourist itinerary: Spencer Villas, Glenageary; Charlemont Avenue, Dún Laoghaire; Nerano Road, Dalkey; Winton Avenue, Rathmines; and Shankill, Co. Dublin.

sank into depression. On November 27 1941, Goertz was arrested at 1 Blackheath Park in Clontarf, a quiet, well-to-do suburb. This was the home of IRA member Stephen Carroll Held, and Goertz offered no resistance upon arrest. G2 had decidWhile this self-proclaimed master ed he had outlasted his usefulness. spy was chatting up women in dark pubs, there still was a war going on, He was first interned in Arbour Hill a war that was to come to Dublin. In Military Prison, Dublin, and then, May 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed the in Autumn 1942, transferred to AthNorth Strand, killing 28 and wound- lone Internment Camp, where most ing 90, either by accident as the German POWs were kept during German pilots mistook Dublin for the war. Goertz had developed a Belfast, or as warning for the gov- real interest in Dublin while on the ernment not to align with the Allies. run, and while interned he wrote Goertz’ opinion of the bombing two plays in German, and translated is not known, but maybe the inci- stories by W.B. Yeats. In September dent to him was an indication that 1946, all German internees were his time was running out. Being a released. In addition, Minister for good German, he continued send- Justice Gerard Boland, announced ing his reports – and kept receiv- that all German spies in Ireland ing fake answers, leading only to would be offered political asylum. more futile meetings with the IRA Goertz was set free and, in February and more tea with his landlords. 1947, got a job at the Save the German Children Fund, an Irish charity esThere were two failed attempts to tablished to assist German children. return him to German-occupied France by boat. In Fenit, County Kerry, Gardai seized his IRA comrades and while attempting to leave Brittas Bay, the boat engine failed, forcing him back to land. Hermann 084

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Goertz was in constant fear of being deported however, since German officers admitted at the Nuremberg Trials that plans had been made to land German troops in Ireland (Plan Gruen). He was particularly afraid of being handed fittingly attired. The Irish Times over to the Russians, who he ex- reported that it was mostly wompected to sentence him to death. en wearing swastika badges in the crowd, a large hand-stitched swasThe final act in Goertz’ story tika flag was placed on the coffin began in 1947, when the Depart- and it was also a woman who whisment of External Affairs persuaded pered “Heil Hitler” and gave a Nazi Eamonn De Valera to reverse the salute. Cards on wreaths announced decision to grant asylum. In April they were from ‘Maisie,’ ‘Mary’ and detectives arrested most former ‘My dearest friend – from Bridie.’ internees including Goertz, and on 23rd May 1947, he was requested The tragicomic self-made spy to report to the Aliens’ Registra- Hermann Goertz was one of the tion Office in Dublin Castle to have last soldiers to be buried with the his parole extended. When Goertz honours of Nazi Germany, and the arrived, a member of Special republican ladies of Dublin were Branch told him that a plane was his most devoted followers. The waiting to fly him back to Germany. fact that Goertz was dropped into He was convinced that his hando- Ireland at all (given his age and ver to the Russians was imminent eccentricities) illustrated the fact and so, deceived by his own delu- that Ireland was just a sideshow to sions of grandeur, and using the last the Nazis. In 1974 his remains were piece of spy equipment left to him, transferred to the German Military Goertz swallowed a potassium cya- Cemetery at Glencree, Co. Wicklow. nide-capsule and died on the floor The rank listed on his tombstone of the Aliens’ Registration Office. there is ‘Major.’ He was allowed keep his imagined promotion.

Prior to this event, Goertz had carved his own tombstone and sculpted a relief on it – a sword sheathed in Marcel Krueger is a writer barbed wire. Goertz’ remains were based in Berlin laid to rest at the foot of this tombstone on Deansgrange Cemetary on Monday 26th May 1947. His lady friends all came to say goodbye, 086

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CORPSEMAN

OF THE

LIBERTIES Ashen, his skin, unsmiling, smokereeking with thin strands of hair like the tines of a fork. I never saw him leave his bookshop even to get a breath of air – where did he go to eat, to get provisions? There was no name on the facade of his shop in Cuffe Street. Not like Dillon’s, the butcher’s shop next door with its gold plate lettering, or even Gillespie’s sweet shop across the road with its black enamel painting, at least telling people who they

were. “In the name of jaysus,” Anto said, “people should tell you who they are.” But the front of his shop was a smooth grey almost like an invitation to fill in the blank space.

Not that it bothered us at the time. As kids, we paid no heed to things like that. We were just interested in the comics, the second hand buys. He paid us for Toppers, Beanos, Dandies and Hotspurs all categorised neatly in rows on

I used to call them, and clerks or shift workers with their tweed caps pushed back on their heads looking for their ‘friction’ perusing the hardbacks, or the lanky man with a walking cane who came in one day looking squinty-eyed through thick lenses. “That could’ve been James Joyce,” my mother said, for she was with me that day buying a few romances. “He could be home for a visit,” she said, but sure wasn’t he dead long ago and I not knowing then. “A dirty get,” she said and I wondered did she mean did he ever wash. “Disgusting the things he put into the books,” and I wondering were they lollipop sticks or chewing gum and said, “How do you mean, Mam?” “Everything in time,” she said. My mother was a bit of a philosopher, she would say things “Not enough room to swing a cat like that, and I getting hungry, it in,” Aunt Peg would say but it didn’t was time for tea. The man with the deter us and, ironically, it was only cane bought five books that day down the road from Kevin Street from the top shelf to the chagrin of public library. Did he even know it Anto. “He left nothing good for the was there? But it didn’t take from rest of us, the bottle-eyed bollox.” his business, not by a long shot.

The library didn’t do comics or the Dull and dingy yes, but the Techadult books that he apparently sold nicolor was within the covers. and for which, judging by Anto, Ivanhoe and the rich colours of there was no shortage of demand. the jousting tournaments. Rob Roy But Anto said the women ‘had it all’ with his shining claymore battling because they were able to get the the redcoats in the purple glens ‘special books’ from the librarian of Scotland. Beryl the Peril up to her usual mischief with the red on their doctor’s prescription. ribbon in her hair. Was it red? MayOther men would come in of be not; it was my imagination, my course, jingle the little bell on the dream. Do we dream only in black door of the shop, women in scarves and white? I see the characters in devouring the ‘mills and booms’ as black and white in my half sleep his dark wooden counter. Adult books walled the premises, some hardback, some exotic paperbacks, one with cancan dancers highkicking, showing off their petticoats, a book which Anto whisked away the minute he laid eyes on it. The story of the Moulin Rouge or some such history, of Toulouse Lautrec, I was to learn later, with quite a large section dealing with the Parisian brothels and his frequenting thereof, and Anto drooling over every word. And this had been rubbing shoulders with staid Alan Lane paperbacks in their faded orange or green, a jaded gesture to colour in the place, but the pages were often gelled together in their umber ageing on shelves, out of my reach of course, in a small dingy room.

and sometimes colours intrude: a Sherwood green hat or an orange tunic, but the overall picture is always monochrome. And Desperate Dan with the designer bristle never growing any longer. Like my da often, or so I’m told after a night on the tear, before he upped and died on us, that is.

When did he die, what was the year? It was the year before they removed the callipers from Anto’s legs, somewhere in those dark grey fifties. What did he did die from?

That was a harder question to answer. Some say the drink. He was a good man for the pint of plain, had been a prisoner of World War II, learned to count in German, used to show off to all the ladies, was a charming man by all accounts, died draining the last drop of stout from the brewery vats in James’ Gate, found with his lips stuck under the taps, they say, the shame of it sucking like a baby at the breast. “That’s what killed him,” said my aunt Peg, who never had a kind word for her brother-in-law. “It was the heart,” my mother said. “What heart did he have?” my aunt Peg said, and the way she said it made her sound like a baying donkey. “Bad cess to him,” she said. “What a thing to say about the dead,” Mam said. “But it’s true,” Aunt Peg said, and there they’d be at one another for hours on end and I like a referee in the middle, not even knowing the man. But the heart is an ambiguous term like ‘dirty writer,’ so I was never clear about the

matter, and besides I was hardly out of nappies when he passed away.

Anto was a few years older than me. He was a teenager. He spurned the comics, considered them babyish, and engrossed himself in the top bookshelves. I could just about reach the counter.

had no significance for the man behind the counter except perhaps to purchase his Sweet Afton which he chainsmoked. Anto would be gone for a couple of hours, the key turned on his bedroom door, his guitar silent – that’s when I always knew he was reading the books.

“When you’re bigger you’ll be able to climb Everest like me,” he would say stretching for a top book. “It’s not for nothing,” he was shouting, “that the ripest fruit are on the highest branch.” Where did he get that from? One philosopher in my environs was enough, I thought, and besides, it seemed boring to me that he would go to such trouble, to strain his eyes on a book that didn’t even have a picture in it. I said it to him.

“Listen, my little man,” he said, “the picture is in the words. The words transfer to your head and you make your own picture, whatever picture you like,” and I thought of the DeLuxe cinema in Camden Street and the bottles and jamjars we collected to get in to see Randolph Scott.

He was a good man for the acoustic guitar, Anto. “See, my little man,” he said, “see the shape like a woman, feel the curves,” and he ran my hand along its edge as if I was blind and he teaching me the Braille. “And the hole in the middle,” he said and laughed, a big guffaw, but he had his Teach Yourself Chords book with its crotchets and quavers, a whole new language for the learning. He knew all the chords in fairness. He practised his G7s or whatever they were till his fingers were raw and sometimes he’d use a plectrum, and I thought that produced a different sort of sound; more plasticky, I said.

“Of course it’s more plasticky,” he said. “In the name of jaysus what do you think the plectrum is made of?”

“They’re the pictures that are made for you,” he said when I brought that matter up, “but the pictures you make yourself, my little man...” he grew excited and said no more, and hobbled away ‘like the callipers of hell’ as the aunt Peg would cruelly say, out the door with head down and his two books under his oxter, as soon as he had paid of course, the sixpence or shilling or whatever it was. The money was like a chit. It

He was into Buddy Holly and would imitate his idol in front of the vanity mirror in his bedroom. I’d be sitting on the side of the bed watching him gyrate this way and that, lifting the guitar over his head and still managing to strum, or holding it down at his knees as if its lower position could produce a deeper base sound, but it was all for show “Listen to his accent. Oh definiteof course. “You have to dance with ly English. ‘But he never speaks, your guitar,” Anto would say. “It’s a Mam.” Did no one ever say, “What

woman, remember.” He was no bad singer and all, and some of the local birds would come up to his room on hearing him belt out “That’ll be the Day,” but we all scarpered when his oul one came home.

The words were big and hard for Rob Roy on the back of the Topper, the story with more print than pictures. The joy, the wonderful luxury of saving that story (I’d already have gone through the easy picture ones like Dan and Beryl) for when Mam came home from Jacobs to put me on her knee. A good excuse as any for, by all the laws of the jungle, I was too big for that knee. “But I can’t follow it, Mam unless I’m sitting there,” I would plead. So when all the wash-up was done and a fire luminous in the grate, she’d be reading the hard words for me. Anto was right, the words were magic and they transported me like Jimmy with his magic patch to exciting and colourful worlds. And I would have the comic finished to swop for another in the bookshop the next day. My mother did not know the bookseller’s name either when I enquired. She became thoughtful.

Having no name on the shop front was indeed strange. “He is English; he is definitely English,” she said as we sat by the fire eating the broken chocolate that she always brought home on a Friday.

is your name, mister?” and it seems no one ever did or else they got no reply. A deserter from the British army, that’s what some of the neighbours said; came over here during the War. But it was all speculation; no one knew for sure. Aunt Peg said he murdered a man. “She would, wouldn’t she?” Mam said.

Aunt Peg was always dramatic, the stories she’d spin had macabre twists to them. Mam said it was because she never married, she had to invent things, pretending that she was lucky that she never had to be dependent on a man. But I didn’t care what speculation they made about the bookseller, I for one was grateful to him for being there, for crossing the Irish Sea if that’s where he came from. To tell the truth, at that time, I didn’t think of him as a man at all, really more like a machine that facilitated the transfer of sixpences and comics and pennies and halfpennies and, even the farthings – he didn’t mind – from his little wooden till which got stuck more often than not. It was roughly made, but he wasn’t in the least bit interested if he couldn’t shut the till. He would just leave it hanging open for some cornerboys to steal from when his back was turned. He didn’t care at all. He had a death wish, that’s what Anto said, like those kamikaze pilots in the War. “How did they do that?” I said.

“Don’t you know,” said Anto, looking at me as if I had two heads, “they’re souped up on something for jaysus

sake.” Some people are like that I suppose; they don’t see any joy in the world. “It’s like he’s in his sarcophagus,” my mother said when I broached the matter with her. “Sarcoff what?” I said. “Coffin,” she said and I wondered if she could have meant “coughing” what with all the Sweet Afton the bookseller smoked.

She sighed a long sigh like those femmes fatales in the films swooning like, that’s what my mother did every so often. “The spit of Vivien Leigh,” Aunt Peg said of her and for a frightening moment I thought my mother might be entertaining a death wish too, but it was all acting, “The life, you have to fictionalise it,” Mam said, “because the reality is too raw.” The women were great actors. They interpreted roles direct from the screen three or four time a week. They went with their broken Kit-Kat in their paper bags. And in between it was the romances from the bookseller’s shop. “We are just birds or insects,” my mother was saying, putting on a posh accent, “flitting in and out of the apertures with our little whistles and sounds from the upper world, the world of light,” for his shop was always dark, lit by the weakest of bulbs, the lowest watt possible. Anto squinted over the words. The bookseller didn’t argue when I said there was a tear in the corner of the Topper.

The comics were really kept well by and large. Some of the kids got their mothers to iron them to get a better price like what the servants do for the newspapers of the gentry. I

asked Mam to iron my Topper but English fella soured her, Mam said.

The slow exhalation of the bookshe told me where to get off. seller was not an act of frustration “But the tear,” I said to the booksell- or impatience with us kids as we er, “and could I have it for a penny vied for the best comics. It was more less?” I was feeling like the opposite like a final breath, like he was finof Oliver Twist with his empty bowl ished with the world, with the shaft asking for more. The bookseller of light coming through the chink accepted without as much as a glance in his door. A vampire, I concluded at the torn comic. He just flicked shouting it out like the fellow in the threepenny bit into the wooden the bath shouting ‘Eureka’ and my till indifferent to its dull thud – he mother refused to read me Dracula, must’ve had some chamois or cloth but I got it in a comic version. I told at the bottom – looking wistfully my aunt about it. I told her how he or was it scornfully? I could never comes out at night like the bats in tell which. Did he despise the Irish? the belfry of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

Was that it? Was that the reason for He flies through the darkened sky his silence towards us? Just as we with his black cloak and protrudlearned in school, were all the Eng- ing fangs preying on the young virlish the same? No, I don’t think it gins of the Liberties. “If there are was scorn, not even a sadness, it was any left,” Aunt Peg said. His ashen despair plain and simple. There was day-face meant he was hungry. It no sparkle in his eyes, never once in all made sense. His grey suit, his sepulchral gear, his shirt, had it got all the times I went into his shop. a removable collar with a stud reI called him the corpseman – I moved? Was there a reddybrown mean I had to give him some name stain somewhere on the cuff that he as he stood ashen in his sepulchre. forgot to wipe off? Maybe Aunt Peg Lazarus, Anto suggested, but sure was right after all, he was a murLazarus rose from the dead. Did derer of sorts. His clothes, dark like he have a passport, a citizenship? part of the furniture, like part of his Speaking minimally with his ‘Yes’ skin, the vellum on the books, the or ‘No,’ belying perhaps a Cockney mould of the paperbacks declaring accent, Aunt Peg said. She knew to the city of Dublin, “I am the moraccents. She drove an ambulance in tar on your grey walls.”

London during the Blitz, and proved it because she showed anyone who In his backroom, the bookseller doubted her, her English driving had a singing kettle. It would sing licence: expired nineteen forty one. sometimes when we kids were engaging in a final swop before the She never wanted to say any more big resale. He’d pour the tea into a about the neighbouring island. An tannin-stained mug. How come I

remember all these details now?

They must have sublimated into my mind as I perused the comics.

He waited patiently, just standing there. He never sat, although he had a threelegged stool behind the counter that he kicked against from time to time. Was it accidental, the kicking, or was he taking his frustration out on the three legged stool as he lit up another Afton, illuminating the ashen face? But he was always obliging; someone who was there for us to use. Nobody tried to get a word out of him. “It was a waste of time; he’d tell fuck all,” Anto said.

“You could be there till the cows come home.” “Oh, he was a wanted man,” my aunt Peg said, “seeking his liberty in the Liberties of Dublin.”

Were the police after him? Were there enquiries? The drunk biddy up Bow Lane, sitting in the pool of rain water in the black shawl with her jug of porter, sang songs about the wanted man. Who was she referring to? “The one who gave her the left shiner,” my mother said.

Mam quashed speculation that he might be a Jew. “Too big to be a Jew,” she said. He was a tallish man, but were all Jews small? “No no,” she said, “there’s no sign on his door like they have on the doors in old Jerusalem off the South Circular Road. You’d recognise those houses,” she said, “by the little relics they hang on their door posts.

But whatever he was, he was a most obliging man. When Anto reached

for the topshelf, he furnished him with a little stepladder. Maybe it was he felt sorry for him with his callipers on. Anto, being older, would have known better than me about the bookseller. “He gets all his stuff from England,” he said. “Are there no Irish comics?” I said. Anto laughed. “Gael Óg and Our Boys, they’re the ones all right,” he said mockingly, “they’d give you a horn, they would. Read all about Fionn mac fuckin’ Cumhaill and Kitty the Hare. She never ages you know, that’s the gas thing. In the name of jaysus can you credit that?” ‘But it’s the same with the characters in the English comics,” I said. “But Kitty the fuckin’ Hare,” he said, “I mean ghost stories, farfetched and far flung down some country boreen.”

“What about Dracula?” I said. ‘Bram Stoker, he was from Clontarf?”

Anto went to James Street Christian Brothers’ school. “They beat the lard out of you,” he would say almost in a boast. I went to the convent in Warrenmount. Two neighbour girls brought me because my mother was at work. They held my hand crossing the road. I used to break away from them at every opportunity. I’d run around the public toilets in Dean Street shouting, “You can’t catch me,” and they running after me. “I’ll tell your mother,” they’d shout. Girls were for having fun with, even the nuns, but they weren’t girls, they were strange creatures with big white veils and black robes. They waddled along in their convent like

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penguins. They had no arms or legs, big fat rosary beads hanging out of them like chains. I never saw them in the street, no more than I saw the bookseller. Was it the weather that kept so many people inside? I loved getting out every opportunity to go up to the swings in Saint Stephen’s Green or in the gloaming to play in the old Huguenot cemetery at the back of the flats, pretending the cabbage heads were skulls, frightening ourselves as much as the young ones who were running away.

Anto was born bowlegged and had lots of operations in the Adelaide hospital in Bishop Street. I can remember visiting him, and I a rather large baby on my mother’s knee.

Some of the neighbours would give out to her. “You’ll spoil him,” they’d say and Aunt Peg said I’d bring her varicose veins back, but Mam didn’t pay attention to any of them. Anto would be laughing and always reading, he didn’t seem to mind being in hospital at all.

Anto bragged that he was the fist boy in the flats to don long pants before the age of twelve to cover up the scars on his legs, but a gang of corner boys ambushed him coming home from school early one autumn day. I saw it happening with my own two eyes but I was too small to intervene. I was on my way to meet him as I often did, being off earlier than him. My mother didn’t know I wandered. She didn’t mind my being out when the evenings were bright.

I remember the street lights coming into pink. They took him aside, pulled him into Swift’s Alley. I told them to leave him alone. They just laughed at me and called me a ‘scut.’

I ran for a rozzer but they were not to be found. Never where you want them, that’s what Mam always said, and I had to agree with her on that score. I looked back helplessly from the end of the lane. They took down his trousers and kicked him black and blue for having the presumption of trying to be a man before his time. But Anto would get over those sorts of things. He was a fella you couldn’t keep down, cheerful by definition and he’d shrug the beatings aside like the curl on his brow and hobble off down to the bookseller for what he called his ‘consolation’ reading.

I lived in an artisan dwelling in New Bride Street not far from the Iveagh flats, a small two bedroomed with a few wisps of grass growing in the front and a black gate too stiff to swing on and which broke the spine of my aunt Peg’s poodle for trying to escape underneath it. The house was a godsend though, Mam said, “You know how may steps I had to lorry you up and down in your pram when we were on the top storey flat in Iveagh?” I wondered why my mother said “lorry me up” when she was using a pram.

We lived together, my mam and I, and Aunt Peg of course minus her poodle. I was an only child, the

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exception rather than the rule I can tell you without fear of contradiction at that time in the Liberties.

She was a good looking woman, my mam, by all accounts, and had house callers of both genders. She’d make them tea and buy an apple tart from the Kylemore Dairy or a brack or some scones which she heated with the butter melting on them. Never an alcoholic drink did she offer anyone. She’d had enough of that in her time.

She got proposed to a few times, my aunt Peg told me, some years after my da died, but she turned all offers down. “Once was enough,” was what she said, and I began to wonder by the bemused look she threw in my direction, was it me that was the once and my da was the enough. But she enjoyed the women’s company. She had a saying and I think I know what it means now.

She said the men were monosyllables, and the women were polysyllables. She was quite a reader, my mother, she knew all the big words, read a lot from the bookseller’s shop and from Kevin Street library and was a divil for doing crosswords.

And that was how my mother described the two genders of our race, for the women in the Liberties were always good at the talk. They could spin yarns, they could induce peals of laughter from your lips one minute or tears of sadness from your eyes the next. I’d be sitting there of an evening at the mahogany table

that granny left us, cut down into a square shape to suit our little room, reading my comic, half listening, half reading, wishing at first these women would go away so my mother could read me Rob Roy. But after a while I found myself getting into their stories about the tricks they played on their husbands – they always spoke of their husbands as if they were dark dangerous creatures whom they were in dread of.

“Is it time? He’ll be bawling for his dinner. I’ll have to go before I’m eaten.” They told about Rosie who lived in a basement flat in Iveagh Trust, how her husband was a rig and Rosie did the business with the society man and the husband never batted an eyelid, and that’s gospel.

The spin they could put on these stories, you couldn’t help but be enthralled. But what is gospel? I always had little problems on what was the world and what was the fantasy, and I swear that to this day I still don’t know the difference. Was Rob Roy real? I began to wonder. Was Beryl a real peril?

Was the bookseller a figment of our imagination? Oh no, he was real all right. Let’s not get too carried away, I mean the street was real, Cuffe, and the shop, that nameless conglomeration of bricks, and the little tinkle of the bell and l going down the step, and the men having to duck their heads. Yes, all that was real. I understand completely now what my mother was at. They were just a growl in the morning and a grunt in

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the evening. Men were no good, any of them that I met that is, except for the bookseller, and he said nothing at all.

When I started on Robinson Crusoe, the bookseller became a sailor who mutinied, was forced to walk the plank and prodded off the prow into the Irish Sea. He swam with his long arms until he reached Dublin Bay and, covered in sludge, holed up like Diarmuid and Gráinne on the hill of Howth. Afterwards he worked as a stevedore and a barman until he got enough money to purchase the lease of his Cuffe Street shop.

I was dreaming away like this on a murky Sunday morning holding my mother’s hand on our way back from White Friar Street church. We were walking towards the bookshop when I noticed a crowd had gathered in the street. I heard my aunt Peg say, “What’s afoot?” “Twelve inches,” Anto said, for he was always saucy even with adults. “The bookseller is dead,” my mother announced, still with her missal in her hand. She was reading a little card with a black border pinned to the shop door. I pushed in close to her, my quiff being tossed under the elbows of adults. “Read it out, Mam,” I said. There was emotion in my voice. She put her arm around me.

Henry Eppel R.I.P.

death recorded in the newspapers?

My mother checked the Sundays.

Nothing. And the Herald on Monday. Nothing. My aunt checked the Mail.

Sunday, the 24th (suddenly), Eppel, Henry, formerly of Kensington, London. Deeply regretted by his loving sister, Wendy.

Regretted? Did that mean this Wendy one killed him? “No no,” said my mother, “it’s just a way of speaking when someone dies.”

Why hadn’t he told us his name?

“Nice morning, Mr Eppel,” or “Henry, wasn’t that a gas escapade for Desperate Dan last week?” We could’ve had a familiarity, him and I. He could’ve been a father figure, what with my da gone. It was an unmarried sister who put the notice up, Aunt Peg said, wherever she had got the information. “The misfortunate man,” she said, “his wife and children were killed in the Blitz.” “Is that true?” I said. “By all accounts,” she said. “But what about proscription?” I said, meaning “conscription,” the emotion making me mix up my words. But Aunt Peg knew what I meant. “There might’ve been a bit of that in it too,” she said, delighting as always in opening up the possibilities of further woe.

I looked at the bookseller’s window, covered in black drapes. Was the 097

James Lawless is a writer based in Leixlip

Issue Four Out June 2015

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seapoint’s last newsagent the disappearance of aldborough house the liberties remembered dublin’s last nazi east wall’s vinyl king the whiskey revival g

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