The arrival of the supermarkets put many village butchers under the knife but one in Rathmines has more than made the cut, writes ROSE DOYLE.

DAVID NOLAN’S butcher shop is a quietly essential part of the heart of the main shopping drag in Rathmines. Has been for a while now, since 1936 when Limerickman Patrick (PJ) Nolan first set up shop a couple of hundred yards further down the Rathmines Road.

Patrick Nolan went on to make his mark on the meat business, both as one of a group of butchers who set up Dublin Meat Packers (DMP) in the early 1950s and as a family butcher with two shops in Rathmines.

A couple of notable firsts about Nolan’s family butchers are part of the story as told by David Nolan, the man who runs today’s shop with equanimity and an eye to the past.

A delivery bicycle in the window, complete with basket,tells you this butchers is no newcomer even before you step inside and onto the old-style, terrazzo tiled floor.

David Nolan, around the shop since he was a lad and running things for most of the rest of his life, fills in the detail.

“My father was from west Limerick, from a farming family, and came to Dublin in the mid 1930s. He married Kathleen Clark, from Co Meath, and was only a while in Dublin when, in 1936, he set up shop further down the road, opposite where Aldi is now. He moved here in the early 1940s, when this place became available. This building was originally a residence, one of the oldest buildings in Rathmines.”

David Nolan, these days, lives over the shop but grew up living “down the road” in Rathgar.

“There were four of us, two girls and two boys. I was the second to be born, in 1945. I’d have done some deliveries growing up. We had a bike, like the one in the window, all the shops in Rathmines had them. We had two shops then, too, this one selling beef and lamb, another across the road selling pork and bacon and cooked meats.

“That’s the way it was; butchers sold meats separately. O’Gorman’s had a pork shop, too. In fact, there were a dozen if not more pork and butcher shops in Rathmines in those days, with enough business for everyone, too, even up to the early 1950s. Very few of the original shops, of any kind, are left around here now.”

Meat was bought in the cattle market, or bought in from farmers in Meath and Kildare, in Wicklow for lamb, and prepared for selling in the shop.

“A lot of meat comes in ‘ready prepared’ now but, in those days, you’d see carcases hanging, sometimes even outside. We didn’t do that, we had a big fridge from very early on. We had the first refrigerated window in Dublin too, maybe even the first in Ireland. My father imported it from America. He was a very forward thinking man. It filled the window. We had a refrigerated counter too, one that closed completely.”

David Nolan went to school at Rockwell in Cashel, Co Tipperary. He worked in the shop during the summer holidays and, though he’d planned to study accountancy in UCD, decided to stay on working the summer he left school.

“I suppose when you’re used to money in your pocket you don’t want to become a starving student!” he says. By such things are the course of lives decided; he was 18.

“The shop had blue tiled walls when I came in, 45 years ago. The floor was as it is today, even grocery shops had those tiles then. My father was very involved with DMP by that stage; he created the trade with France for Irish lamb. My brother, John, when he left school, went into DMP with him. Neither of my sisters went into the business.”

He remembers how people used eat much more offal: “Liver and kidneys and tripe. Eastern Europeans and Chinese people are my best offal customers these days, they eat tripe a lot.”

Rathmines, he says, caught up with the swinging sixties towards the end of the decade. “I sold a lot of mincemeat for spaghetti bolognese. We had two vans and a scooter with a box carrier at one stage, doing deliveries. There would be a big roast delivery to Dartry and Palmerston Road areas; people don’t cook a Sunday roast to the same extent any more. Our pork shop across the road closed when the Swan Centre opened in the 1970s.”

David Nolan says eating habits have changed thanks, in part, to celebrity chefs. “People watch them on TV and food fads change accordingly. If a cook on a Saturday morning programme uses lamb shanks you’ll know within a couple of hours! A few years ago, when a programme a few days before Christmas recommended goose fat for roast potatoes, I lost count of the number of people who came looking for goose fat.”

The “toughest time” for the business came when “supermarkets started opening in Rathmines. They changed eating habits too – not many people ate prepared foods before they arrived. We felt it, really felt it, when the supermarkets opened.

“But we had to change and adapt, sell more prepared meats, more sauces and the like.”

He moved from Rathgar to The Ward, Co Dublin when traffic congestion made city living more and more difficult. “The family was farming out there by then anyway. I travelled daily from The Ward for years. In the beginning it was a 30-minute drive but in later years it took me 30 minutes to get out of the gates and onto the main road because of traffic! I bought this building when it came for sale, about 20 years ago, before the boom in property.”

He moved back to town with wife Orla and their three sons,Andrew, Paul and Stuart, who were “nearing the end of their schooling by then. The boys, when they were younger, did some messages – one still does a few deliveries. There are two storeys over the shop with three bedrooms, sittingroom, diningroom and kitchen. It’s much handier than living in The Ward.”

Rathmines has changed, he says, but not dramatically. “It’s still a flat and student land but places like Leinster Road and Leinster Square are much more residential. Bedsits are gone, Rathmines is too sophisticated for that these days. It’s always had a mobile population, students coming and going, generations of them living on Nolan’s mincemeat – though chicken is more popular these days. They’re more adventurous cooks, I suppose.

“It used to be that you could set your clock by them on the way home from college, dropping in to do the mincemeat buying. Rathmines always was a cosmopolitan area and still is; we’ve every nationality here. Lots of my customers are Eastern European and Chinese.”

He has a huge affection for the neighbourhood. “Rathmines has everything, apart from a cinema now the Stella is gone. But we’re going to have a cinema soon, in the Swan Centre.”

He agrees the shop is an important part of the area, says he’ll “stay with it”. He doesn’t regret not having studied accountancy, doesn’t know who will take over, but has “a few years to go yet” himself.