We present the text of a speech made by author Christine Dwyer Hickey at the Dublin Literary Dinner, 2025, celebrating the winner of this year's Dublin Literary Award, Canadian author Michael Crummey.
From the end of WW2 to the first stirring of the Celtic Tiger, Dublin was the capital of a country that minded its own business and didn't overly concern itself with the outside world. Brendan Behan once declared that he wouldn’t mind joining the Irish navy because he always wanted a job where he could get home every night for his tea.
Certainly, when I was a child, Dublin seemed like a village. People stepped in and out of each other’s lives as they went about their daily business, calling greetings to one another across city streets, stopping on city corners to exchange gossip and opinions that required little or no basis in fact. Outrages were aired on such matters as sport, governmental decisions, and – an occurrence so grievous that it would be reported on the six o’ clock news - the most recent hike in the price of a pint of Guinness.
Dublin remains a compact city even if many people would rather connect to their phones than their fellow citizens. Streets widen and then suddenly tighten again. Pubs arranged in clumps, two or three at a time, are easy to dip in and out of. This makes it ripe for coincidence and intrigue – in other words, the ideal literary location. James Joyce recognised this and gave us Ulysses, a novel effervescent with humanity in all its graces and disgraces. Since then, many of us have followed, or I should say have attempted to follow. Right up to the glintingly dark Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
As a child, I spent a lot of time in or around Grafton Street, mainly because I spent a lot of time with my father. He had a wide circle of friends who frequented a narrow circle of pubs.
On Sunday mornings Grafton Street became our playground while my father buried himself in a morning session that often drifted on till evening.
In fact, one of my earliest memories is being caught in a lock-in during the holy hour in McDaid's pub. The holy hour, for those too young to remember, was when the pub closed in order to give the barman a chance to have his dinner and customers a chance to sober up before the evening session kicked off. I was about 3 or 4 years of age and it was well into the holy hour when the Guards came rapping on the window of McDaid’s. Customers were ushered to the men’s lavatory which, as I recall, was a subterranean pit, odorous with ammonia, urine and sour Guinness. 'Just keep your hand over your mouth,’ my father whispered to me, 'and you’ll be grand.’
I wasn’t officially allowed to go into town on my own, until I was 10 years old. It was a rite of passage – a decade under your belt and you could spend the afternoon wandering around town with your pals. I don’t imagine that is still the case today. Another rite of passage was the purging of schoolbooks. This followed the Leaving Cert exams. Students took their schoolbooks into town, tried to flog them at Webbs bookshop on the quays – alas no longer with us. Those books that had been rejected were flung into the Liffey. On the last day of exams, you could look down the river and see books flying like seagulls off the various bridges. I don’t imagine that happens now either.
Many of Dublin’s pubs have closed in recent years but those I knew as a child and indeed, as a young guzzling woman in her own right, are still standing. Well, in body anyhow, although in spirit most have changed. The exception being Grogan’s, a pub that long ago slipped into a time warp which it has clearly no intention of leaving. Others have gone to immense expense and trouble to disimprove themselves. This is known as gentrification.
Dublin remains a compact city even if many people would rather connect to their phones than their fellow citizens. Streets widen and then suddenly tighten again.
People talk about dear old dirty Dublin of the pre-Celtic tiger days. The depravation of the 40’s and 50’s, the filthy streets, barefoot children selling newspapers to keep a bit of bread on the table. And even on into the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s Dublin life is often portrayed as a monochromatic struggle to survive.
But this city has always enjoyed its fair share of glamour. Think of all the old family photographs gathering dust in shoeboxes and albums: girls in gowns and men in dress suits on their way to dress dances in venues along O’Connell Street – yes, O’Connell Street.
And I remember - now around six years of age - coming home late from somewhere with my parents and being sneaked into the Bailey for a night-time drink. I was told to hide in the corner and keep myself invisible. As this corner contained the poet Patrick Kavanagh moaning and groaning to himself alongside Luke Kelly with his splendid halo of orange hair – it was hardly the most inconspicuous spot in the house. Looking around, I saw the place was packed with sophisticated women who smoked as if they’d taken classes in it. And the men, dressed in well-cut suits with the occasional long-haired arty type in-between. Even the barmen wore dickie-bows for God’s sake! No loud music, no television in the corner: just conversation that rattled and zinged.
It was like a cocktail bar in Manhattan. Indeed, years later, I would recognise the scene in various episodes of Mad Men.
I rarely meet anyone I know on Grafton Street now, and if someone did call out a greeting to me, I probably wouldn’t hear it with the various groups of buskers roaring in my ear. I walk down the street and try to remember the old shops, the one with the big ear in the window – what did they do with that ear, I wonder? Johnathan’s café, the bookshop that specialised in art books, the cinema. Switzer's where up to the 1970’s women could leave their fur coats in cold storage over the summer.
But most of the shops I knew are gone, some replaced by cloned outlets that could be almost anywhere. It used to make me feel sad to look at all that. It used to make me feel like a stranger.
But then life moves in circles.
Recently, my daughter who lives just off Clanbrassil Street about a 15 minute walk from here and, as it happens, very close to the site where my father was reared, sent me a video of her daughter - my granddaughter Isabella. It was taken by the childminder who, for a bit of fun, interviewed Isabella then aged 3 and a half, on the occasion of her first bus trip. As the bus trundled down New Street, Isabella was asked to look down and describe what she could see.
‘I can see my village,’ she said, ‘and my shops. And there’s my church,’ Here she pointed proudly to St. Patrick’s Cathedral – even though at that stage, she’d never been inside it.
‘And that’s my park,’ she continued pointing down to St Patricks Park, I have two parks you know, the other one is down there where the ducks live.’
‘But who are all those people Isabella?’ the childminder asked.
‘Oh, they are the people who live in my village.’ There was a pause before she added ‘and their visitors.’
And so, I realised, that Dublin may not be my village anymore, but it is Isabella’s. She will go to school in town, she will walk home from town, she will get to know it like the back of her hand. She will know the people in her village, and their visitors. She will own her village. And because it is her village, it can be mine again through her eyes.
Find out more about the Dublin Literary Award here
