Frank Harte shows Shay Healy around the Dublin village of Chapelizod.
A stroll through Chapelizod with architect, song collector and singer Frank Harte starts at Anna Livia Bridge over the river Liffey, renamed in 1982 in honour of the centenary of the birth of James Joyce.
James Joyce knew Chapelizod well, and it is the setting for the short story 'A Painful Case' from the book Dubliners. The nearby Mullingar House also features centrally in ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ in which publican Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker resides.
In Chapelizod Frank Harte points out derelict houses where families lived when he was growing up. The village is a stone’s throw from the Phoenix Park,
The area known as The Bank and New Row, was built to house distillery workers and their families.
Frank Harte's father owned and ran ‘The Tap’ pub in the village, across the road from industrial buildings where in the seventeenth century flax and linen were processed. It then became a distillery and latterly a warehouse, before being destroyed by fire in recent years.
Another writer with Chapelizod connections is Gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873). The village and environs provided inspiration for his ghost stories, horror fiction and many novels, in particular, ‘The House of the Churchyard’,
In his descriptions of it, and the house, you know he was here.
Just off Main Street is Saint Laurence’s Church of Ireland with its distinctive fifteenth century square stone tower, which incorporates a section of a round tower. The site has for centuries been associated with the mediaeval tale of Tristan and Isolde.
It’s from Isolde that the village got its name.
This episode of ‘The Dublin Village’ was broadcast on 15 July 1988. The presenter is Shay Healy.
‘The Dublin Village’ was an eight-part series about the capital’s urban villages broadcast in Dublin’s Millennium Year of 1988. The presenters were Shay Healy and Ingrid Miley.
