Joan Ryan remembers her first meeting with Patrick Kavanagh and having tea with him in Mitchell's. She describes being with Patrick Kavanagh as being in the company of a charming, witty man. She also talks of Kavanagh's love for Hilda Moriarty. Joan Ryan also relates the poet's wishes for her daughter, Derbhail at her christening.

At the time of Kavanagh's move Dublin was very much a hub of literary life where writers and poets gathered in local hosteleries to discuss and analyse what is literary and what is not.

As Brendan Kennelly commented in his Thomas Davis lecture on Kavanagh:

"Kavanagh satirises these events, people and ideas, we would expect him to satirise: Dublin's pretentious poetasters, its bumptious 'intellectuals'; its complacent middle class, its viscious sentimentality and its insincere good nature."
(RTÉ Guide, Oct 4, 1974, Vol.11, No.40, p.13)

This is the side of Patrick Kavanagh's life that Tom McGurk examined in the programme 'The Jungle of Pembroke Road'.

Patrick Kavanagh came to live in Dublin when he was in his thirties, in 1939, and lived there until his death in 1967.

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