An Irishman's Diary

If you think the streets of Dublin are dangerous now, be grateful you didn't have to walk them 200 years ago. I owe this admittedly unremarkable insight to Thomas and Valerie Pakenham, whose Traveller's Companion to Dublin- first published in 1988 and re-released in 2003 - is a fascinating collection of vignettes from the city's history.

Here, the authors quote JE Walsh, a 19th-century attorney general, recalling a tactic once popular with the "footpads" (horseless highwaymen) who lurked at night in the dimly-lit streets: "A cord was provided with a loop at the end of it. The loop was laid on the pavement, and the thieves watched the approach of a passenger. If he put his foot in the loop, it was immediately chucked. The man fell prostrate, and was dragged rapidly up the entry to some cellar or wasteyard, where he was robbed and sometimes murdered.

"The stun received by the fall usually prevented the victim from ever recognising the robbers. We knew of a gentleman who had been thus robbed, and when he recovered found himself in an alley at the end of a lane off Bride Street, nearly naked, and severely contused and lacerated by being dragged over the rough pavement."

The divide between rich and poor was cavernous in Georgian Dublin and the classes kept a safe distance from each other. Apart from occasions of robbery, the only thing that brought them together was a taste for "fighting", in which - according to Walsh - "the highest and lowest seemed alike to participate with astonishing relish".

The riots had a northside/southside dimension that puts the modern-day rivalry into perspective. In particular, Walsh describes the deadly hostility between the "Liberty boys" - tailors and weavers from the Coombe - and the "Ormond Boys" - butchers from the markets off Ormond Quay - who fought frequent running battles, sometimes lasting for days and making the quays and bridges impassable.

"The weavers, descending from the upper regions beyond Thomas Street, poured down on their opponents below; they were opposed by the butchers, and a contest commenced on the quays which extended from Essex to Island bridge. The shops were closed, all business suspended; the sober and peaceable compelled to keep [ to] their houses. . .while the war of stones and other missiles was carried on across the river, and the bridges were taken and retaken by the hostile parties.

"At one time, the Ormond boys drove those of the Liberty up to Thomas Street, where rallying, [ the Liberties] repulsed their assailants and drove them back as far as the Broad-stone, while the bridges and quays were strewn with the maimed and wounded."

The fighting didn't stop with missiles. Walsh noted that the butchers sometimes used their knives to "hough" (cut) the tendons of an opponent's leg, "thereby rendering the person incurably lame for life". In retaliation, the Liberties marked one victory by dragging prisoners to the markets. There they dislodged the meat, hooked their rivals up by the jaws, and retired "leaving the butchers hanging on their own stalls".

But it wasn't only the lower orders who enjoyed a fight. Young male aristocrats boasted of their involvement too. And the students of Trinity College had a particular weakness for joining in, usually on the side of the Liberties. Once, wrote Walsh, several students fell captive to the butchers and, "to the great terror of their friends", were reported to have been suspended in the manner previously described.

The authorities scrambled a search party to Ormond Market, where they witnessed the "frightful spectacle" of several college boys hanging in their gowns and caps. But in fact, the students had escaped lightly. On closer inspection, it emerged that the butchers, in deference to their youth and social rank, had hung them only by "the waistbands of their breeches".

Apart from the muggings and the riots, the other thing that struck observers of old Dublin was the begging, which was on a scale far greater than today. Most visitors only saw it on the surface. But the Tyrone-born writer William Carleton caught a glimpse of the city's underground, literally and metaphorically, when he lost his job as a teacher and could no longer afford respectable lodgings.

Directed to a cellar off Bridgefoot Street, he paid two of his last three pennies for a bed, and entered a scene compared with which, he claimed - a little hysterically - "Dante's Inferno was paradise".

The venue was, he later learned, one of more than two dozen places where the city's beggars and conmen passed the night. Its inmates included many who were genuinely blind, or deaf, or lame. But it also included the professionally infirm, here appearing with their stage clothes off.

The new arrival marvelled at the wardrobe. "Crutches, wooden legs, artificial cancers, scrofulous necks, artificial wens [ lumps], and a vast variety of similar complaints were hung up on the walls of the cellars," he wrote, before retiring to bed surrounded by much drinking of "liquors of every description, from strong whiskey downwards".

As he reflected "on the degree of perverted talent and ingenuity that must have been necessary to sustain such a mighty mass of imposture", Carleton's only consolation was that he had nothing worth stealing. Even so, he didn't close his eyes all night: "So soon as the first thing like light appeared, I left the place and went out on my solitary rambles through the city."