Kathleen Behan.
Mother Of All the Behan’s on Katheen Behan is one of those great books so often overlooked. Her own mother was a maid in the house of Madame Maud Gonne MacBride, and I love this little tale from the book. I also scanned up the picture above, as I couldn’t find any decent sized image of Kathleen online.
I was in the ‘Deux Magots’ in Paris one time and an American that I was introduced to asked me if I had known James Joyce. I said that I hadn’t had that honour, but I told him that my mother had often served a meal to W.B Yeats in Maud Gonne’s house on Stephen’s Green and that the poet turned up his nose to the parsnips. ‘He didn’t like parsnips?’ said the American reaching for his notebook,’You’re sure this is factual?’
(…)
He wrote in the book: Parsnips- attitude of Years to. ‘And you say he didn’t like Stephen’s Greens either- now what kind of vegetables are they?’
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
Reminds me of a colleague who was asked by a visiting American “Who’s that guy on top of the Dome”.
He was referring to the statue of the bishop on top of the [oxidised] Custom House Dome.
Quick as a flash, my colleague replied “That’s St. Stephen Green”.
It may not have been original but it was quick.
Brilliant story; Plastic Paddys in one sip.
I know a group of American tourists who think James Connollys moustache is in an envelope in a safe located in the basement of the GPO. I’ve no idea where they got that story from..
I’ve heard that DFallon tells them that on his walking tour.
“I’ve heard that DFallon tells them that on his walking tour.”
And why not?
Under the tiles on the main floor of the GPO there Connolly left a bloodstain….in the exact shape of the map of Ireland! The Church covered it up because they were afraid it would become a shrine for the Godfree and some of them might get cured of a serious illness or two and then where would we be….
I was once asked if Yeats wrote Easter 1916 because he was in the GPO.
There wouldn’t have been any room for Yeats. If you count the number of people who got the pension because they were in the GPO there wasn’t enough room left for a cold germ.