Defending the city

Citing the fate of Bewley's as evidence of the death of 'old Dublin' is to do a disservice to the surviving old guard, writes Rose Doyle

Listening to the death knell sounding from Bewley's (I'm one of those weeping) and to the cry going up daily, anyone would think that Dublin had lost its heart and its soul. It's all a little previous, to say the least.

Dublin has far from given up its heart and its soul is in the good hands of a quiet and long-standing army of family businesses. They're everywhere and they care. For generations in some cases, centuries in others, they've been the traders and shopkeepers who supply Dubliners with the necessities of life; the people on hand with hats and haircuts, meat and drink, music, cinemas, burials, locks and keys, shoes, gravestones, bikes, art, furniture, teeth. And with the little luxuries of life too - Dubliners have always known where to go for furs and good wine, for flowers, jewellery and gilded frames.

They've all got stories to tell and they've been telling them in the commercial property pages of this paper for three years now. What began as a great idea of then property editor Jack Fagan grew in no time into a popular series. We got letters, comment and phone calls. People wanted to be part of it, to add to the stories told. Now, thanks to New Island publishers, the stories have become a book.

As Peter Sheridan says in his foreword to the book, these are "the voices of individuals who speak with great love and pride in what they do and what their ancestors did before them". He says too that "their stories are full of humour, humility, warmth and insight". He's right.

It was Brendan Crowe, of Crowe & Co Monumental Sculptors on Thomas Street - makers of grave- and tombstones - who first said to me that in some ways the city has been improved, some ways degraded. Others echoed him, over and over. Many said the traffic was the thing killing Dublin, not seeing at all that they themselves were the thing keeping it alive. The fabled Celtic Tiger, many said, passed them by. Just charged past the end of their street, not knowing what to do with them, growling and carrying on with what had to be done elsewhere. "The Celtic Tiger never impinged on us," was how Brendan Crowe put it. "How could it?"

Dunnes Fuel and Garden Centre at Percy Place is one of only two original canalside fuel depots left in the city. Time was when barges would travel down the canals with Guinness and coal and return to Dublin filled with turf. Greene's Bookshop, where new and secondhand books have been sold since 1843, was before that the place to go in Dublin for ladies' hosiery. Before that, in the late 1700s, it was the four-storey-over-basement home and workplace of the original owners. And so the stories go.

Few in the book are as loud in their passion for the city as Gerald Davis, the painter and gallery owner on Capel Street whose Jewish Lithuanian grandfather became an Irish citizen in l904. He recalls two-way traffic and horses and carts in Capel Street in the same breath as he rails against the "disgraceful" kiosks by the river, which he believes are "an affront to everybody"

Jimmy's Delaney's grandfather came from Kildare in l917 and set up a bicycle shop at Harold's Cross Bridge. It's still there. An ancestor of Elizabeth Barnardo's married Wolfe Tone. Barnardo Furriers have been selling glamorous furs at the foot of Grafton Street for 130 years.

The Classic Cinema in Harold's Cross, a cultural icon for many years, sadly closed last year. Bill Coyle has stopped selling hats in the Aungier Street hatters, which opened in 1925.

There are those in the book who put themselves and all they owned on the line to save a business. Barbers Liam Finnegan and his daughter Linda bought the Waldorf Hairdressing and Shaving Saloon. On Westmoreland Street since l929, it would have gone the way of many a saloon but for them.

"The funny thing is," Finnegan says, "I feel like I've been here forever." He will go on being there; they will all go on. The series goes on too, of course. There's no end to the traders and shopkeepers holding Dublin together. The more you look the more there are to be found.

Trade Names: Traditional Traders and Shopkeepers of Dublin by Rose Doyle is published by New Island and costs €20.

Rose Doyle's new novel Shadows Will Fall is published by Hodder & Stoughton.