City pharmacy endures through family chemistry

TradeNames: A Parnell Street pharmacy - known for its skincare products - has survived through revolution, civil war, hard and good times and is now one of the oldest shops on the street, writes Rose Doyle.

In deceptively desultory fashion, wearing his white coat and tossing out the wisdom of one who has seen life do its best and its worst, Con Foley tells the story of the Parnell Street chemist shop opened by his father in 1909.

As well-known today as it has ever been, its continuity assured through Michael, son of Con, and the third generation to run things, Foleys is still the place to go for skin preparations which are old and tried and made the way they always were. All part of the Foley story and, en passant the story, too, of number 136 Parnell Street and environs.

When Con Foley says he's been "in the pharmaceutical environment" all his life he's talking about 87 years. He and his nine siblings were reared in the rooms over the chemist. "Most businesses lived overhead in those years," he says, "couldn't afford to live anywhere else. My earliest recollection of this premises is of my mother telling me to keep back from the window because of the shooting going on. There was a dead body on the ground across from the shop and we couldn't go near it for days."

Before those civil war days there was Micheal John Foley, father of Con and a farmer's son from Knockrea, Co Limerick. The youngest of 12, his mother died when he was two years of age, his eldest brother was Canon James Foley of Drumcollogher. His son tells his father's story with these and the other details which matter.

"He went to St Munchin's College, then to the seminary at Belcamp and Liverpool. He left the seminary to come to Dublin and was apprenticed to an old pharmacist, a Mr Martin who was unmarried and lived in Terenure. After doing pharmacy he studied medicine for four years in the College of Surgeons but ran out of cash. He became an assistant in the Hamilton Long branch at the corner of Suffolk Street and Grafton Street. This was about 1902-3.

"He was a big man, and had a good appearance, and a lot of his customers came from the Kildare Street Club. The Duke of Connaught used come in. Pharmacy in those days was very British orientated. The examiners' names on my father's cert are Warwick, Kerr, Bronte and the like. He had to work 10 times harder than anyone else to get his cert."

Con Foley is achingly alive to the family's early days in Parnell Street. "The poverty! Oh, Lord bless us, the poverty! And the good people who were around then, lovely people. This was a very derelict area then too, a slum you'd call it."

He remembers a Mr Cunningham who was a groom in Farrell's Undertakers of Marlborough Street. "A very gentle man, he looked after the horses very well but had nothing in his tenement room in Grenville Street but a bed and his overcoat as part of the bedding. My mother would send me with a chicken to him on Christmas Day. In Grenville Lane, off Hill Street, there were up to 600 pigs kept at one time."

He recalls too how women would buy "tuppence worth" of ammonia to bleach their hair and Jim Larkin's son telling him how he used be sent to Foleys for 2d worth of hippo wine and squill for the throat - a bottle would have cost 1/3 and was too expensive. Foley's Pharmacy was the first place in Parnell Street to have a phone and electricity.

He recalls a night when De Valera's brother-in-law, a man with "a £2,000 price on his head" came in to have a compound made up. "There were a couple of armed, British army men outside the shop. If they'd seen him my father would have been shot."

A brave man, Michael Foley was part of a 1923 committee whose members included Mrs Frances Sheehy-Skeffington and whose function was to reorganise Sinn Fein. "My father had eight children at the time and it was risky activity," says Con Foley.

Con qualified as a chemist in 1943. "I've always worked here, never worked for anyone but my father. We've five generations of people coming in today. Working in the old-style pharmacy business helped the memory. Foley's Pharmacy always made a speciality of skin preparations, especially for acne and psorisis. My father started making them in 1914 and I improved on them, if you like, and am still making them. We send them all over the world. It works by word of mouth. Americans come in during the summer time and we get at least one person from Finglas every week!"

He shows a preparation he's working on, says it was "always considered a good spring medicine", that it used be available freely but that no one's really asking for it now. He's not giving away the secret of the ingredients either. "Pharmacy," he says, "has moved very much from compounding to dispensing. Today's pharmacists have the advantage of doing biology, which we didn't have. We, on the other hand, did botany and meteria medicine."

Con Foley married Peggy O'Sullivan, who'd been reared in Co Clare but was living in Bray when they wed, in June 1949. He was 31. "She came to serve her time with my father and paid him a fee of £50 for four years," Con says. "A chemist colleague said to her that it was £50 well spent!"

Peggy Foley, nee O'Sullivan, died in 1985. She and Con had six children. Their father talks, happily of them all. Of Susan who is a teacher in Tallaght, Raymond who is an accountant and Conal who is president of a coffee company in the US. John, also in the US, works for Fed-Ex while Gerard runs a limousine service.

"I bought this building from James O'Rourke, who owned it, in the late 1950s for £2,000," he goes on, "and it cost nearly €1 million to restore it. Even the cellar's been done - long ago there used be rats down there, the old buildings were a bit like Dickens' world. My son Michael owns it; he bought the premises from me. It's a fine building now, with three storeys over the shop and a basement."

Con Foley hasn't had great luck with property, ever. He saved to buy a first family home for the family, buying for £2,200 on Seafield Road in Clontarf in 1949. "I sold it in 1960 for £1,800. There was no run on property at the time."

Parnell Street has changed completely, he says. "It used have stalls selling fruit and vegetables and fish on the street. I remember great local people, like Mary Brough and Nell Hayden who used sell fruit. The only other business to survive any length was the furniture store Cluxton. It's gone 10 years now but the son of the family is still a customer of the chemist. One morning recently I'd a customer from Kosovo, followed by a Nigerian woman and after her two Russians with children. They all had minor skin conditions and were all living in rooms around about. The local people had told them we were good on skin ailments."

He's determined that Foley's skin preparations will continue. "The recipes are there, just logical things that'll do the job. Confirming to a person what's wrong is half the job. I'll keep coming in here myself - what else would I be doing? Walking around? Michael is a pharmacist and good all rounder and his son Eoin will take over in time so the business will continue in the Foley family."