A walk, physically and in the imagination through the Dublin of 1798 with its passionate events, is admirably encapsulated in a small, but durable, brochure by Denis Carroll, who has already given us the fine biography The Man From God Knows Where. This brochure is called simply Dublin in 1798, Three Illustrated Walks. He has a neat map which, very clearly, in black and white, delineates the three routes chosen. This was, he reminds us, behind the formal beauty of certain parts, a pungent, if not stinking city, as well as being one seething at the time with plots and counter plots highminded plans for the uplifting of the Irish people, and dirty tricks from an army of Castle based spies and double dealers.
His first walk starts at Trinity College Green (formerly Hoggen Green). Wondering at the "superb" Bank of Ireland facade, formerly Parliament House, he here quotes an unnamed writer as giving it "a grandeur completely lacking in its shambling Westminster counterpart". King Billy's statue stood in the Green ("bedecked with garlands after the rising"), and to be blown up in 1928. The first walk, as far as Tailors Hall, has so much concise fact, anecdote, colour and illusion, so much of everything in so small a compass, including excellent pen and ink sketches by Orla Davin, that we will pass over the second walk, introducing the Liberties, to take the third route - from Capel Street to Croppies' Acre.
Capel Street, we are told, was once Dublin's chief street. And it was from this area that United Irish leaflets, manifestoes and so on, were disseminated throughout the country by carters, peddlers and even by the stage coach itself. But Pill Lane, here Chancery Street stands today, more or less, was the epicentre of sedition" for Dublin Castle. "The Marats of Pill Lane" was a phrase used by the Establishment.
Where the leaders of 98 met, lived and died is, with fine compression, given in this most useful and indeed decorative booklet. A sidelight, apart from the three routes, tells us that in Grafton Street, during the repression after May 1798, a Grafton Street apothecary allegedly confessed to selling over a thousand ounces of arsenic to domestics in order to poison their employers. Booksellers in Dublin have this little gem. £3. It will be much praised in the Brazen Head tonight at a launching.