Come Here To Me!

Twitter really is awful when you’ve work to do. Surreal stuff all the same. “Something only we three would know”

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I’ve always loved the area around Ladys Lane in Kilmainham. It really is ‘old Dublin’ at its finest, a part of Dublin that truly hasn’t changed much in recent times. Sadly for residents, the area is infamous for flooding. Tom Macken’s excellent woodblock captures the lane perfectly, easy to miss as one drives past on route to the Liberties.

Tom Macken 'Lady Lane, Old Kilmainham' Woodblock

Passing in the car, this was spotted recently at the top of the laneway, the Lady of Ladys Lane. It appears like chalk, but she’s come through some awful weather unharmed. You’d miss her driving past, but she stares down Lady’s Lane towards the grounds of the Royal Hospital. A beautiful little touch, whether sanctioned or otherwise.

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Great stuff via Humourisms.com , of the often forgotten day in Dublin’s history when Alan Rickman briefly occupied the GPO. Die Hard is a far superior film to Michael Collins of course, but guess which one you get free when you join Young Fine Gael on Fairs Day in Trinners?

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I had to laugh when I saw this doing the rounds on Facebook.

Irish Rail are currently asking commuters to vote for their favourite station, based on issues such as station presentation and services. A campaign of sorts has sprung up behind Broombridge station. Anyone who has been through Broombridge station will know it is beyond the words ‘awful kip’, a station neglected while those around her have been modernised, she continues to crumble, the very station sign telling you where you are difficult to read.

I would like to ask you to take a moment and vote for Broombridge as station of the year. Once more this humble Dublin station has excelled and deserves our recognition, it shuns many of the newfangled modern ideas in transport like ticketing and not being on fire and has once more outclassed the rest by just being two poorly guarded concrete platforms.

Brrombridge winning the ‘Best Station’ award would draw some attention to the sheer state of the place, and be the best coup for a public vote campaign since the BBC had to award the Wolfe Tones the best song of the last century. Go over here and give it a minute.

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The line-up was the Dubliners, Peggy Seeger/Ewan MacColl, and Joe Heaney – Half the audience was sleeping drunk. The other half was rowdy drunk. The concert was broken into two halves, and each of the three acts was to appear in each half. Joe, being the ‘less well known’ was to open. He was booed off by this despicable crowd after the first two lines of his first song. It is to our eternal disgrace that we other artists went on after he was forced off, almost in tears – I am sure the lack of appreciation in Ireland for Joe Heaney at that time was one of the reasons that he emigrated.

The above comes from Peggy Seeger, wife of Ewan MacColl, recalling a 1964 concert in Dublin at which sean-nós singer Joe Heaney of Connemara would be met by loud boos from a crowd who were wildly enthusiastic for the more moden traditional sounds of the likes of The Dubliners. It was an amazing moment in the history of traditional music in the capital, a culture-clash of sorts, and all the more remarkable today when one considers the fact Joe Heaney’s face is now beaming down from the walls of O’Donoghues, considered a legend of the traditional scene.

Born in the Carna, in the Galway Gaeltacht, Seosamh Ó hÉanaí arrived into the world in 1919. Over the course of his life he would spend much of his time living and working in Britain and even as a doorman in New York City, where he could be found at 135 Central Park West. There’s a wonderful story of one American walking into O’Donoghues establishment and being baffled to see his doorman Joe upon the walls. Towards the end of his life he even became artist in residence at the University of Washington in Seattle, before his death in 1984.

His contribution to Dublin life however, is huge. He was a core part of the O’Donoghues folk and trad renaissance. While the pub has undoubtedly changed and morphed in recent times for better or worse, his image is still there alongside the likes of Ted Furey, The Dubliners and the pubs legendary owners Maureen and Paddy O’ Donoghue on the walls of the pub today.

In Liam Mac Con Iomaire’s excellent study Seosamh Ó hÉanaí – Nár fhágha mé bás choíche, published by Cló Iar-Chonnachta,one image in particular is striking. A banner, draped across the O’Donoghues side entrance, reads ‘FÁILTE ROMHAT JOE’, upon a return home.

Yet while those who booed Heaney off stage in 1964 were probably wildly singing along to Seven Drunken Nights, it’s unlikely any would have been familiar with Heaney’s Peigin is Peadar which predates Seven Drunken Nights, yet contains the very roots of the song. It was unsurprising that when booed by the crowd in 1964, Ronnie Drew himself would reprimand the audience for their disrespect to a singer The Dubliners considered a core influence.

Pheigín na gcarad a Pheigín mo chroí
Cé hé an fear fada údan sínte leat síos?
O a hó, a hó mhaithín ó; A hó mhaithín ó, a stóirín mo chroí.
Muise, a Pheadair na gcarad is a Pheadair mo chroí
Sin é do leanbh nach bhfaca tú riamh.

O Peggy my dearest, O Peggy of my heart
Who is that long man stretched out next to you?
O, my goodness, little treasure of my heart.
That’s your own baby you never saw before.

Liam Mac Con Iomaire’s study of Ó hÉanaí (written in the Irish language, with quotations in English, and coming with a CD of Seosamh singing) warrants reading not just for those interested in his own musical history but also getting a better understanding of the scene in Dublin around that time.

Éamonn Ó Bróithe is quoted as saying

The mood of the pub was further invigorated by many from literary and theatrical Dublin who came to enjoy the music. The general mood of ’60s’ optimism prevailed, and one notable effect was the breaking down of social barries and differences between town and country engendered by a common appreciation of the music

It is worthy of note that Seosamh managed to find his way into Andy Irvine’s take on those days in O’Donoghues.

Joe Ryan and John Kelly in the front bar,
their fiddles are from the County Clare.
Joe Heaney sings in the cold night air
in the laneway after closing….

BELOW: Ewan MacColl in conversation with Seosamh regarding his advice to young singers, in which he asks would young Dubliners be welcome in Carna to learn.

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When you hear the words ‘Madame Tussaud’ and ‘Dublin’ together, you’re probably listening to somebody taking the piss out of the National Wax Museum with a statement to the effect of ‘It’s not Madame Tussaud’s is it?’

Many will be surprised to hear that Madame Tussaud not only resided in Dublin for a period, but indeed put on exhibitions of her waxworks here in the capital.

Madame Tussaud first arrived in Ireland in February of 1804, following in the footsteps of a man named Philipstal, with whom she was in a business partnership. As Pamela Pibeam noted in her Madame Tuassaud: And The History of Waxworks, Marie Tussaud stayed away from England between the years of 1803 to 1808, “years when the threat to England from Napoleon was taken seriously and anti-French feeling was at its height.”

Madame Tussaud and her son Joseph resided at 16 Clarendon Street in Dublin, and as Frank Hopkins noted in his priceless Hidden Dublin, it was at this point that she bought out Philipstal’s share in their business partnership and went on to open her own waxwork exhibition at Shakespeare’s Gallery in Exchequer Street. This exhibition is discussed in Siobhán Marie Kilfeather’s cultural history of the city (Dublin:A Cultural History) noting that this ‘Grand European Cabinet of Figures’ consisted of not only the horrors of the French Revolution, showing faces cast from the victims of the guillotine, but also showed models of Henry Grattan and other contemporary Irish political figures!

Henry Grattan

Madame Tussaud would write that “when I am in Dublin the takings can reach £100 sterling a month. People come in crowds every day from 6 o’clock until 10 o’clock.”

Madame Tussaud returned to Scotland in 1808, and toured Scotland and England until 1816. As Pibeam notes in her biography of Tussaud, in both Ireland and Britain visitors to her touring wax exhibition would be met by a waxwork of Joseph Tussaud, “stressing the family character of the entertainment.”

From the point of her return to Britain onwards, her show would begin to place more and more focus on the British royal family, and Madame Tussaud made plans to return to Dublin with her exhibition in 1821, a trip to coincide with a royal visit to Ireland. Christine Trent has written a fascinating piece entitled ‘Shipwrecks, Riots and Fires’ on how Madame Tussaud’s has survived them all, and her return to Dublin in 1821 features. She had been onboard The Earl of Moira, which set sail from Liverpool for Dublin, but this was to prove a disastrous trip. Not long after setting out from Liverpool, the ship was wrecked and many of her waxwork figures destroyed. As Trent writes, they were to be become almost like floating corpses!

Tussaud would return to Liverpool following this disaster. It was to be 1835 before she would establish a permanent base in London at the Baker Street Bazaar, and the exhibition moved to its present location in Marylebone Road in 1884.

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I thought this great fake New Years Eve poster worth sharing, it’s been doing the rounds online and I had to smile. There are posters designed like this all over the city weekend after weekend, not least around Temple Bar. Have a good one whatever you do, and normal service will resume here in 2012!

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Damien Dempsey dropped in on Occupy Dame Street last night, performing Celtic Tiger, Negative Vibes and new one Community inside the ‘Yellow submarine’. Damo has just come off the back of three sold-out nights in The Workman’s. After playing a few tunes, he took a tour of the site.

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Two drinking Santas, lifted from The Irish Press of old.

It’s likely things will go quiet on this front and many others in the coming days. We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the best to you and yours over the holiday period. Be careful not to stamp anyone to death during the stampede for the January Sales (which tragically start earlier and earlier every year) and try to make the most of the period.

As in other years, we’ll leave it to Damien Dempsey’s version of O’Holy Night. Despite not setting foot in a church for anything but a departure in recent years, I’ve always loved this.

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I stumbled across this poem recently and thought it worth sharing, from George Bernard Shaw. Not too long back, we posted a link to a fascinating Irishmans Diary on the story of the plaque on Synge Street marking the birthplace of Shaw. While a Dubliner of course, upon leaving Dublin it is fair to say Shaw had little plan to return. “We’re a fair race” Shaw remarked, “we never speak well of each other.”

At last I went to Ireland
‘Twas raining cats and dogs:

I found no music in the glens,
Nor purple in the bogs.

And as for angels’ laughter in
The smelly Liffey’s tide-

Well, my Irish daddy said it,
But the dear old humbug lied.

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There’s just certain things Dubliners, both native and adopted, should know about this city. Lets start with an obvious one.

The cafe on the top floor of Easons is like a 1913 soup kitchen, only it’s not lines of starving workers before you but shoppers on the verge of collapse. It’s midday, but clearly some of these people have been on the go since the shop doors opened at 9am, and they’re probably a few dodgy jumpers off finishing their Christmas shopping. Stuck for time, we make the call to head elsewhere. The better-half has a bus to catch soon from Parnell Street, but there’s time for a quick coffee. The bus is just too soon to enable a trip to the likes of the Lovinspoon up by Parnell Square, but just long enough to allow for a coffee on O’Connell Street.

Cafe Kylemore is much the same. It’s not really an option to settle on this place with crowds out the door. Town is absolutely mental, it’s like the yanks on what they term ‘Black Friday’, where frenzied showdowns for toasters and DVD players and all sorts of goodies make it to YouTube, showing that mankind isn’t as far removed from the animal kingdom as we sometimes think. People push by and head down Talbot Street carrying more bags than you’d think possible, and across the street at the GPO the preachers continue to preach like this was any other Saturday, everything from repression in China to the word of God, from the need for socialism to the Hare Krishna mantra spouted into megaphones at uncaring shoppers.

The Gresham, we’ll pop in there. Two coffees. They drop them down too, how fancy. There’s two lovely biccies on the side too. Toddy’s Bar and Brasserie, how often I’ve passed it and never walked in. We chat happy, sip the hot goodness and with ten minutes to go until the departing bus, decide it’s time to make a move.

I head back to the barcounter (“You can pay at the end”) and hand over a tenner. She gives me back a single Euro. I instantly feel like a gobshite. At €4.50 a coffee, perhaps this one is best avoided. Yet being told The Gresham is expensive is as unsurprising as being told Copper Face Jacks attracts off-duty Guards and schoolteachers. It’s my own fault. We’ve all heard the little old ladies on Liveline giving out about their lunch in The Gresham, folks take it from me. Just get into the line at Easons and hope for the best.

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