Maurice Earls writes: Everyone agrees that James Joyce, who was born 140 years ago today (February 2nd), was unusually observant. Somehow he captured what he observed, the people, the places, the moods, the furniture, the pain, the tone, the feelings, everything, in words. The detailed mosaic, particularly of lower middle-class life in Edwardian Dublin,…
A copy of the events magazine ‘In Dublin’ from 40 years ago, long filed away, reveals a city in which it was just becoming possible to publicise gay rights networks and when young whippersnappers like Fintan O’Toole and Colm Tóibín were starting to flex their intellectual and polemical muscles.
In 1579 Dublin’s pig-warden is Barnaby Rathe, bellman, master and beadle of the beggars. His main problem is less the escaped pigs who must be rounded up or the beggars than the slippery citizens who won’t pay him for his labours. Peter Sirr on Dublin’s walls.
Dubliners on Culture Night this year heard a talk about one of the most eminent Dublin newspapers of the early nineteenth century, delivered in the very heart of what was then the city’s newspaper and publishing district.
Not everyone in Irish political life supported women’s suffrage. In fact the idea was strongly opposed by many in the Irish Parliamentary Party and by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Nevertheless, the independent state managed to get in well before the United Kingdom.
A squabble between servants in a Dublin house, which led to one of them being ‘let go’, ended up in court when the parlourmaid Rosa McCabe alleged that she had been fired after being wrongly accused of voicing pro-German sentiments.
The arrival of the department store at the end of the nineteenth century gave birth to a new social actor, the shop girl specialising in sales. Exploitation, of more than one kind, remained, but here was a figure with more pride and independence than the traditionally heavily oppressed grocery employee.
A tradesman’s demand for a fee that seemed exorbitant led ‘The Irish Penny Magazine’ back in 1840 to muse on the relative value of slaves in America and the children of the poor in Ireland.
Peter Sirr prowls the tangled history and contemporary reality of Dublin’s Docklands.
The differing attitudes of Irishmen in the period from 1914 to 1922 and beyond can be seen through a brief history of three men. One of them, Emmet Dalton, served with distinction alongside Michael Collins. He had previously been in the British army, and he wasn’t ashamed of that.