..call for a crafty bike shed.
Thanks Atticus
Or is It?
You may know Dublin-based ‘news trading floor’ Newswhip.
They provide free of charge the excellent widget to your right tracking the most popular stories on social media..
Newswhip launch their NEW site today which is responsive so – FINALLY – people with smartphones don’t have to squint any more to see the most shared stories.
Founder Paul Quigley writes:
To mark the occasion and moved by BS posting de papers [every night]. We decided to see what they would look like if we replaced the front page with the stories from each paper that people were sharing and talking about most on social media. Some photoshopping later and: Viola – the People Powered front pages from Wednesday’s papers, stacked next to their original equivalents…
This could get ugly.
Full set here
A collection of Dublin’s most prized and beloved shopfronts created by ‘In the Company of Huskies’ and photographed by Luca Truffarelli for VisitDublin.ie.
Above: Irene Kelly (O’Donovan’s, Pearse St, Dublin 2); Patrick J. Buckley (F.X. Buckley, Moore St, Dublin 1); Sunil Sharma, (The Kiosk, Lr Leeson St Bridge, Dublin 2); Christy’s Walk-Round, 8 Mary Street, Dublin 1 and John McHugh (Makeshop, Lincoln Place, Dublin 2)
80% of those polled said that people in same sex relationships should be able to have the same rights as traditional families, 41% said they had some reservations about adoption by gay couples.
49% of people said they believed in equal rights for gay people, but had some reservations about same-sex marriage.
41% of respondents said they believe those who oppose same sex marriage rights are homophobic while 59% disagreed.
UCD Choral Scholars – Ireland’s Call
Óisin Ó’Callaghan (solo); Desmond Earley (conductor) and the UCD Choral Scholars 2014 get their Phil Coulter on ahead of this weekend’s rugby international against England at Twickenham.
Choral groups?
What next?
BALLET!?
Thanks Oisin
Maria Falinaсочувствую лондонцам. на Дублин надвигается новый шторм сегодня вечером. рекомендуют запастись едой и не высовываться из дома без лишнего повода
I came across two reviews of pubs in the city from magazine ‘In Dublin’. Both from 1977. This issue (no. 34, Aug 1977) reviewed:
- Mulligans, Poolbeg Street
- Davy Byrne’s, Duke Street
- Kehoe’s, South Anne Street
- Grogan’s, South William Street
- Dohney and Nesbitt, Baggot Street
- Toner’s, Lower Baggot Street
Later in the year, issue (no. 40, Nov 1977) reviewed:
- Bruxelles, Harry Street
- The International Bar, South William Street
Nearly forty years later and all those pubs are still there. Most of them probably haven’t changed that much. Except for the price of course.
I also stumbled upon this lovely photo of O’Connell’s on South Richmond Street in Portobello. One of my favourite pubs in the city. At a guess, I’d say it was taken in the 1960s.
Also this snap of Doyles, then called The College Inn with The Fleet attached, on College Green opposite Trinity. It’s a great shot with red car flying past and yer man in the sheepskin jacket waiting to cross.
Introduction
As for most of us, being gay in those days was a very lonely experience. There weren’t many opportunities to meet gay people, unless you knew of the one bar – two bars, actually, in Dublin at that time, Bartley Dunne’s and Rice’s … They were the two pubs and if you hadn’t met gay people, you wouldn’t have known about these pubs; there was no advertising in those days, and it was all through word-of mouth.
So the life of a gay man in Dublin in the early 1970s was summed up by one contributor to Coming out: Irish gay experiences (2003). Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s first emerged as gay-friendly pubs in the early 1960s. Some believe that it might have been as early as the late 1950s and I would love to be able to prove this if anyone has any supportive evidence.
There are no traces left of either establishment. Rice’s, at the corner of Stephen’s Green and South King Street, was demolished in 1986 to make way for the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. While Bartley Dunne’s, on Stephen’s Street Lower beside the Mercer Hospital, was torn down in 1990 and replaced with ‘Break for the Border’.
On a side note, some people may be surprised to hear that gay taverns in England date back to the 1720s (Molly houses) while more ‘modern’ establishments like Café ‘t Mandje in Amsterdam have been open since 1927.
Many in both the gay and straight community have described Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s as deserving the title of being the city’s first gay friendly pubs. Why these two particular pubs though?
Most people point to the fact that both were in close proximity to the Gaiety Theatre and St. Stephen’s Green which at the time was a popular gay cruising area. It should also be acknowledged that the publicans from both establishments would have had to have been more progressive/accommodating in their views than the vast majority of other establishments in the city.
George Fullerton, who emigrated to London in 1968, was quoted in Dermot Ferritier’s 2009 book Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland as saying that:
In 1960s Dublin the [gay] scene basically consisted of 2 pubs – Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s. I never experienced discrimination as such, probably because we were largely invisible.
Paul Candon in Gay Community News (February 1996) labeled Bartley Dunne’s as ‘the first gay pub as we know it in the city’ and also referenced Rice’s. He said there was a total of five regular gay-friendly bars to choose from in the 1960s in the immediate Stephens Green/Grafton Street area. The other three being Kings (opposite the Gaiety) and The Bailey and Davy Byrnes, both on Duke Street.
Kevin Myers wrote in The Irish Times (18 May 1995) of his student days in UCD in the late 1960s and how he discovered that ‘Rice’s … (was) in part a gay bar … Bartley Dunne’s was another‘. Furthermore Bartley Dunne’s was described as ‘the most famous and oldest gay bar in Dublin’ by Victoria Freedman in The cities of David: the life of David Norris (1995).
One contributor to Coming out: Irish gay experiences (2003) talks about coming up to Dublin in the late 1970s from the country whenever he could and spending ‘vast amounts of time in Rice’s, Bartley Dunne’s and the Hirschfield Centre‘. Patrick Hennessy made a similar comment on an Irish Times article about the death of early LGBT campaigner in Christopher Robson in March of this year:
Yes farewell to one who fought the good fight back in the days when young and not so young men would come round to the Hirschfeld Centre nervously asking for info. Or sitting in circles exchanging their first tentative views in public about being gay. And then a few weeks later you might see one or two of them sipping a drink in a corner of Bartley Dunne’s or Bobby Rice’s.
It’s hard to corroborate (as only snippets are available on Google Books) but it looks like the 1958 ‘Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe’ described ‘the historic Bailey, entirely reconstructed’ as being full of ‘hippie types and Gay Boys’. It goes onto say that like Davy Byrne’s, neither pub would be ‘recommended for the “straight” traveler’. Surely if true this language is very deliberate? Though I have a feeling this review may have come from a later edition and Google Books muddled things up.
Bartley Dunne’s on Stephens Street Lower.
In 1940, Hayden’s pub (‘a well known seven-day licensed premises‘) on Stephen’s Street Lower was put on the market after the owner James Bernard Hayden declared bankruptcy. In a related series of events, it was reported in the Irish Press (26 September 1940) that the Gardai had objected to renewing the pub’s licence on the grounds that the premises was not being conducted ‘in a peaceful and orderly manner’. It had only closed one day the previous year.
The licence was taken over in August 1941 by Bartholomew ‘Bartley’ Dunne. A native Irish speaker from the West of Ireland, Bartley Dunne Sr. returned to Dublin after nearly forty years of living and working in Manchester. Hugh Delargy M.P. wrote in the Irish Press (16 March 1946) that while in the city Bartley Sr. was:
prominent in the United Irish League, the Gaelic League and the old Sarsfield Terrace. (He knew) Dan Boyle, John Dulanty, who is now the High Commissioner in London; Sir Daniel McCabe, who became Lord Mayor of Manchester, and Tom Cassidy, a great patriot, whose son is now one of the senior aldermen in the city.
Bartley Sr. ran the pub until his death in 1960. It was then taken over by his two sons – Bartley Jr. (known as Barry) and Gerard (known as Gerry). They redecorated the place and built up its reputation for stocking exotic drinks from all over the world. Barry later recalled to The Irish Times (7 Sep ’85) that ‘there was a time when, if a customer wanted a particular drink and we didn’t have it in stock, he got something else for free’.
It would seem that Bartley Dunne’s (known to many as BD’s), which had already been attracting Dublin’s avant garde and theatre crowd, started to become gay-friendly (by word of mouth) in the early 1960s. David Norris has written about visiting the pub as a schoolboy in his late teens in circa 1961/62:
Towards the end of my schooldays I started to explore a little. I had a kindred spirit in school and we occasionally visited a city centre bar called Bartley Dunne’s which was a notorious haunt of the homosexual demi-monde. It was an Aladdin’s cave to me, its wicker-clad Chianti bottles stiff with dribbled candlewax, tea chests covered in red and white chequered cloths, heavy scarlet velvet drapes and an immense collection of multi-coloured liqueurs glinting away in their bottles.
The place was (full) of theatrical old queens, with the barmen clad in bum-freezer uniforms. While not being gay themselves, as far as I know, the Dunne brothers were quite theatrical in their own way. Barry would hand out little cards, bearing the legend ‘Bartley Dunne’s, reminiscent of a left bank bistro, haunt of aristocrats, poets and artists’. Whatever about that, Saturday night certainly resembled an amateur opera in full swing. There only ever seemed to be two records played over the sound system: ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ by Edith Piaf, and Ray Charle’s ‘Take These Chains From My Heart’.
Brian Lacey in his excellent ‘Terrible Queer Creatures: A History of Homosexuality in Ireland’ (2008) noted that among the many characters that frequented the bar was the then virtually unknown Norman Scott, whose 1960s affair with Jeremy Thorpe (later to become leader of the British Liberal Party) forced him to resign from the party in 1976. Scott lived in a flat near Leinster Road while in Dublin. Ulick O’Connor mentioned in his diaries that Scott also had a long relationship with an unidentified person prominent in an Irish political party.
We take it for the granted the range of drinks available in Dublin bars today but Bartley Dunne’s was really a trial blazer. It offered saki, tequila and ouzo before any other place in the city. Mary Frances Kennedy writing in The Irish Times (15 July 1960) was amazed at the range of wines available in Bartley Dunne’s including Bull’s Blood of Eger (11s 6d a bottle); Balatoni Reisling (10s a bottle); Tokak Aszu (19s 6d a bottle) and Samos Muscatel (11 6d a bottle).
In January 1964, an escaped inmate from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight was found in Bartley Dunne’s two days after the jailbreak. William Joseph O’Brien (39), originally from Waterford, broke into the pub and stole cash and cigarettes amounting to £60. The Irish Times (18 January) noted that Barry heard a noise downstairs in the bar and managed to climb out of a window and down a drain pipe to notify the Gardai. O’Brien, with thirteen previous convictions, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment for the break in. He was already serving an eight year sentence.
It was noted in The Irish Times (22 March 1967) that Moscow journalist Lev Sedin, who has visited Dublin a number of times, had recently published a book on Ireland that dealt with politics and economics as well as more ‘frivolous subjects’. One of these was a lyrical poem about Bartley Dunne’s and his experience there of being consulted on the correct pronunciation of the Russian wines in stock. Sedin recommended the pub to anyone in Europe ‘who wished to imbibe true culture’.
A writer called Endymion in a 1968 Dublin guide book described Bartley Dunne’s as the city’s ‘most unusual pub’. It’s clientele was an ‘an odd mixture of bohemians and down-to-earth Dubliners (that) creates an atmosphere which would have interested James Joyce.’
It was described by Roy Bulson in ‘Irish Pubs Of Character’ (1969) as:
one of Dublin’s most unusual pubs with its Continental atmosphere. Well worth a visit to mix with a variety of characters. Ask for the wine list which is one of the most reasonably priced and extensive in Dublin.
Bartley Dunne’s had a ‘French bistro ambience’ with prints on the walls by Cezanne, Monet and Picasso as well as Partisan theatre posters and photographs of film stars. It was also famous for its dimly lit nooks and crannies. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton drank there regularly in 1965 during the filming of the ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’. As did other actors like Kim Novak, Laurence Harvery, Noel Howard as well as local characters like Brendan Behan (who seemingly drank in every pub in Dublin!).
The pub had a reputation for all sorts of madness. A massive bar fight took place sometime in the late 1980s after someone objected to a biker driving his motorbike into the pub and asking for a pint. On another note, my uncle John told me it was the first pub in Dublin that he ever saw someone shooting up heroin in the toilets. A friend Ado also has a story (as I’m sure many others have) of being served his first pint there while still in his school uniform!
Younger brother Gerry passed away in 1981. Barry continued to run the place up until 1985 when the family put the pub on the market. It was bought by three Irish businessmen based in the U.S.
From c. 1985 to its last days in 1990, the pub became the defacto HQ for Dublin’s goth, curehead and alternative metal scene. Drug-dealing also became more open and without the Dunne family behind the bar, things seemed to have got even more wilder.
The pub was sold in July 1990, for a record-breaking £1.7m. It was knocked down and replaced by a super-pub called ‘Break for the Border’ which is still there today.
Rice’s at the corner of Stephen’s Green and South King Street
While Bartley Dunne’s stood out as an alternative bar with an avant-garde clientele early on, Rice’s was an unassuming traditional Dublin boozer. There was a pub on this site from at least the 1850s until the middle of the 1980s. Formally called Eamon Nolans (late 1950s), The Four Provinces (mid 1950s) and The Grafton Bar (1940s), it was taken over by publican Robert ‘Bobby’ Rice in 1960.
I believe it became gay-friendly from this point onwards. The gay ‘area’ of the bar was confined to the section inside the Stephen’s Green entrance. Tony O’Connell, who started visiting the place in 1965, remembers that if owner ‘Bobby was on duty and a non-gay couple came into that bar he would usher them into the back lounge, lest they be contaminated’. So while Bartley Dunne’s was a mixed pub, the gay community were sectioned off in the front bar of Rice’s.
Ireland’s most famous and accepted gay couple Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir (founders of the Gate Theatre) drank in Rice’s as did another famous Irish stage actor, Patrick Bedford.
Bobby, who was married and had an adopted son, was known to be very camp. His brother Pat worked in the pub as a barman and was seemingly very liked by the gay community. The pub was also extremely popular with students from the nearby Royal College of Surgeons.
Former patrons Anthony Redmond and Frank Meier wrote to The Irish Times in January 1986 to lament the closing and the tearing down of the pub. They described as Rice’s as having:
great warmth, character and charm and there was nothing garish, brash or kitsch about its decor. If it was a quiet drink or serious conversation you wanted, with the cacophony of raucous music, Rice’s was the place to go to … In the summer Rice’s pub always looked truly beautiful with baskets of geraniums hanging over the windows outside. It was wonderful to drop in for a quiet drink after a peaceful few hours in Stephen’s Green. The staff was always pleasant, especially Billy whose wit and banter was greatly enjoyed by habitutes like myself.
The Rice family later went on to open The Village Cafe in Rathmines.
Conclusion
From all accounts, the heyday of Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s was in the 1960s when they were the only shows in town so to speak. They provided a very important early social space for gay men in the capital. Street harassment from the police or drunk revelers was almost non existent during these years.
The 1970s saw the establishment of Ireland’s first gay rights organisations and discos. The Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) was founded in 1974 and the first gay disco soon followed over a health food store called Green Acres in Great Strand Street with DJ Hugo Mac Manus. In 1979, the Hirschfeld Centre opened in Temple Bar as a gay community centre and began running a disco on the weekend called Flikkers (Dutch word for ‘Faggot’).
Mark, who was on the scene in the early 1980s, told me:
The community centre was the first full-time gay and lesbian venue in Ireland. It housed a meeting space, a youth group, a café, a small cinema and film club and it ran discos at the weekend where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people socialised. It really was amazing and as a lonely lost 18 year old, having this place as a free club where I felt I belonged was essential.
1979 was the same year that The Viking bar on Dame Street opened its doors. Tony O’Connell remembers that this was an important ‘stopping point on the “pilgrimage” between Rice’s and Dunne’s’. Other popular gay-friendly bars in the 1970s/early 1980s included The Pygmalion (now Hairy Lemon), The South William (now Metro Cafe), The Parliament Inn (now Turk’s Head), The Oak on Dame Street, The Foggy Dew on Dame Street and The Pembroke (now Matt the Thresher) on Pembroke Street. Women-only lesbian nights were held upstairs at the weekend in JJ Smyths on Aungier Street in the early 1980s. Davy Byrnes and The Bailey (Saturday mornings only) still remained popular.
Dublin’s oldest-running gay bar The George opened on South Great George’s Street in 1985 and so the next chapter of Dublin’s gay social life begins.
Though Rice’s and particularly Bartley Dunne’s did remain popular (as far as I can work out) with the gay community in the 1970s and 1980s. One blogger (‘eskerriada‘) described Bartley Dunne’s in the 1980s as having ‘a weird mix of rockers, punks, bikers, students and middle aged gay men’. Though it was widely known that the two places were gay-friendly, both owners rarely liked the attention.
In the above piece from 1975, one proprietor (later to revealed as Barry Dunne) said:
It is known that a certain number of these people come in every now and again. Most people regard it as a bit of a laugh … This is a public house and people have certain rights
Ten years later when the pub was being sold by the family, Barry hadn’t really changed his tune, telling journalist Frank MacDonald in The Irish Times (7 September 1985) that the pub did attract a ‘few who were that way inclined but it was really nothing like the rumours’.
You wonder whether Barry Dunne has today, twenty eight years later, come to terms with the fact that his pub attracted a large amount of gay people and that it played a very important part in the social history of the community. You’d also hope that what he said to newspaper journalists (in a time when same-sex sexual activity was still criminalised) differed from his real-life views.
While both pubs were extremely different places, some key dates overlapped. Bobby Rice took over Nolans in 1960, the same year that the Dunne brothers took over the pub from their Dad. The Dunne family sold their pub in 1985 while Rice’s was demolished the following year. (Though Bartley Dunne’s was open, under new management, until 1990).
Both pubs played an integral role in the development of Dublin’s gay social scene (and as a result probably gay politics) and should be remembered.
If you have any memories, anecdotes, pictures or any related information about Rice’s or Bartley Dunne’s - please leave a comment or get in contact via email.
(Thanks to Tony O’Connell, Mark Irish Pluto, Mark Jenkins, John Geraghty and others for helping with this piece)
One of my favourite views in Dublin is looking over into Rathmines from the Portobello Bridge, with the dome of the Catholic church visible.
The beautiful dome of the church dates back to 1923, as the church was almost totally destroyed by a fire in 1920. Incredibly, it appears from the statements of some IRA members to the Bureau of Military History that this church premises was being used to store weapons at the time of the fire by republicans in Dublin, and that weapons were hidden from authorities following the destruction of the church by sympathetic figures in the fire brigade.
On 26 January 1920, the sacristan of the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Refuge arrived shortly after six o’clock to find the switchboard that controlled the electricity ablaze inside the vestry. Fire quickly spread throughout the church, with newspapers noting that the flames were “spreading with alarming rapidity in all parts of the building, and mounting up the walls to the base of the spacious dome.” While Rathmines had its own functioning fire service at this time, the Dublin Fire Brigade also arrived on the scene, with The Irish Times reporting that:
The Dublin Fire Brigade, which had been sent for, worked in unison with the Rathmines Brigade, and placed two engines on either side of the Grand Canal at Portobello Bridge, and soon had a copious supply of water sent in through the rear of the church by way of Mountpleasant Avenue.
The fire was an incredibly dangerous job for the firefighters on the scene, with the dome roof of the church crashing down, leading to fears some men may have been trapped underneath, although this was thankfully not the case. The Irish Times noted that for hours after the blaze continuous streams of water were poured upon it, and that the overall damage to the church was estimated at between £30,000 and £35,000, thankfully covered by insurance.
The first hand testimonials of several republicans given to the Bureau of Military History suggest that the church in Rathmines was used by republicans as a place to store weapons, and indeed as a place in which to seek refuge. Henry Murray, a veteran of the Easter Rising and active with the Dublin IRA through the War of Independence recalled that he and another members of ‘A’ Company of the Dublin Brigade “frequently slept in Rathmines Catholic Church when ordered to remain away from home to evade arrest.”
Murray gives plenty of information in his Witness Statement to suggest that there was a strong relationship between local republicans and this church, noting that:
The Clerk of this Church was at that time a member of “A” Company and he acted as assistant to the Company Quarter-master. In pursuance of his military duties he utilised some of the vaults in the Church as a “dump” for the major portion of the Company’s arms and equipment.
Murray claimed that the IRA were storing “rifles, revolvers, ammunition, hand grenades and military equipment” in the vaults of this church, and that when he arrived at the scene of the fire:
I found that several members of the Company who were aware of the position, had entered the building at great personal risk, made their way to the vaults and were engaged in removing the dumped arms and ammunition to places of safety.
Another account of the church and the movement is found in the statement of Michael Lynch, a member of ‘B’ company of the 4th Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA. Lynch gives a different account of the fire somewhat, which suggested that many weaposn were destroyed by the blaze, but noting that there existed a fear among the IRA that the presence of a weapons dump in the church may be discovered by the British during the clean-up, and that “I knew what a disaster it would be to ourcause if the British got hold of the fact that we were using the vaults of houses of worship as dumps for arms.”
Lynch describes going to meet with Captain Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade, who he knew to be “a very fine fellow and, from the
national point of view, thoroughly sound and reliable in every way.” John Myers, the head of the Dublin Fire Brigade at the time, could even boast of appearing within the pages of Ulysses, and in the days of revolution in Dublin he appears to have been a very useful ally to the IRA, as Lynch recalled:
I told him the true story and asked him to see that the Rathmines people got no inkling whatever of the fact that some dozens of rifles and revolvers were lying in the debris under the floor of the church. He told me not to worry, that nobody would ever know. The incident passed unnoticed by anybody.
Captain Myers, who was asked by concerned republicans to ensure no weapons would be recovered from the church (NLI)
The distinctive dome of the church today is often said to have originally been intended for Russia, with an article in the Sunday Times in 2001 writing of the fire that destroyed the Rathmines church in 1920 and noting that:
Meanwhile, across the water in Glasgow, a specialist manufacturing firm had just mothballed a massive, ornate copper dome believed to have been commissioned for a church in Russia. It is likely the contract was derailed as a result of the Russian revolution and the emergence of Lenin’s anti-religious Bolsheviks.
A contemporary newspaper report from the 1920s on the construction of the new dome however stated that “the architects are Messrs. W.H Byrne and Sons, Suffolk Street, Dublin; the consulting engineer Mr. Alfred Delap….of Dublin and the steel contractors Messrs. J and C. McGloughlin Ltd., Great Brunswick Street, Dublin.” We’d love to hear from anyone who knows more of the contemporary dome and its origins.
——
Rathmines has featured on CHTM before, with this article from Sam looking at working class housing in the area. Dublin Fire Brigade and the Irish Revolution, referenced above, is available to purchase here.
Below is the excellent 1976 RTÉ documentary on Irish involvement in the Spanish Civil War (Spanish Anti-Fascist War, 1936-1939) uploaded by our good friend and grandson of brigadista Michael O’Riordain, Luke in the last couple of days. Presented and produced by Cathal O’Shannon, the documentary features contributions both from Irishmen who fought for the International Brigades on the Republican side and those who travelled with Blueshirt Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade to support Franco and Fascism.
The documentary title was inspired by poet Charlie Donnelly, who remarked that ‘even the olives are bleeding’ shortly before he died fighting for the Republic at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937.
The documentary features some amazing footage, including an Eoin O’Duffy address from the balcony of the Ormond Hotel on Dublin’s Ormond Quay. Other notable contributions, apart from those with Michael O’Riordan and his great comrade Bob Doyle, came from Terry Flanagan, ex-baker and Saor Eire member and Alec Digges, a brigadista who returned to Ireland from Spain, before going on to fight in the Second World War, where he lost a leg.
Mural of Brigadista, Bob Doyle, installed on the Cobblestone Bar, Smithfield, (since removed.) From An Phoblacht.
On the fascist side, there is contributions, amongst others, from George Timlin, an NCO in the Irish Army who gave his reasons for going to Spain as “the spirit of adventure” and to quote “to oblige a friend… Eoin O’Duffy who wouldn’t have asked me if he didn’t want me to go” and Padraig Quinn, veteran of the War of Independence and the Civil War who, encouraged by the anti-communist sermon of his local bishop, joined Eoin O’Duffy’s legion.
Its sometimes easy to forget that there were Irishmen on both sides in an at times brutal war, and this documentary gives a good account of both.
It may be just me but I think it’s cheeky beyond belief that the people behind Bad Bobs 2.0 in Temple Bar have recently proclaimed a part (!) of their pub as ‘Temple Bar’s Oldest Pub’. With a lick of paint and some Ye Olde knickknacks in the window, they hope to fool and no doubt pull in some of that Yankee dollar.
I took this picture during the week of the ‘The Snug Temple Bar’:
As you can see, they got a painter to recreate an old-style Dublin boozer sign above the door. For added measure, they even have the ‘Licensed To Sell Tobacco, Ales, Stouts & Spirits’ blurb. To make it even more of a joke, you can’t get into the ‘The Snug, Temple Bar’ without going through the main Bad Bobs entrance!
But as we know, before it reopened as Bad Bobs in March 2013, the Purty Kitchen was just another bland, crappy tourist trap. Nothing historic about it whatsoever. It’s been through countless name changes and been sold and bought by various business groups over the decades.
This is what it looked like exactly a year ago. The part of the pub on the on left hand side (beside the two people) is now the self-proclaimed oldest pub in Temple Bar. What difference a year makes.
The premises, situated between 34 and 37 East Essex Street, has been known as Nugents (1960s), The Granary (late 1970s) and Bad Bobs (1984-2006). It was bought in 2006 for a whopping €12 million by Conor Martin, a publican who owned The Purty Kitchen in Dun Laoghaire. At the time, it was the property of Liam and Des O’Dwyer of the Capital Bars group who are behind Cafe en Seine, the Dragon, the George, Break for the Border and a number of hotels. It was renamed Bad Bobs in March of this year.
There’s no denying that the address is historic. An Irish Times article from 8 November 2006 stated that there has been a pub on the premises since 1728. But during that time there has been numerous name changes, auctions and buy outs. There’s no doubt that interior as been gutted and renovated three or four times at least.
Finally, where on earth did they pull that 1694 number from?
As we are entering the anniversary of the centenary with the outbreak of World War One, controversies over how to commemorate the past are heating up. A few day ago, I published comment in the Austrian daily Die Presse on debates and controversies over the commemoration of World War One. As unfortunately these debates are mostly published in German (and Serbian) only. Thus, some key points and links here.
In my comment, particularly focus on how in Serbia and in the Republika Srpska there is a fear that the established national narrative is challenged in the context of the centenary. This is also an aspect Norbert-Mappes Niediek and others have recently commented on. The most recent example was dramatic press conference in Andrićgrad–the newly built ethnocity as a tribute to Andrić close to Višegrad–by Miroslav Perišić, the director of the Archive of Serbia and Emir Kustrica, director of the Andrić Institute and part-time movie director (the RS, the main founder of Andrićgrad also boycotts of the EU-France-led commemorations in Sarajevo in June 2014). At the press conference Perišić presented a letter by the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia 13 months before the war urging-preparing war against Serbia. The supposed “smoking gun” turned out not to be one. First, the Serbian translation did not match the German original and second, scholars were long aware that there were hawks in Austria-Hungary (as elsewhere) lobbying for war. In the case of Austria-Hungary, it was not only the author of the letter, Oskar Potiorek, but also the chief of staff of the army, Conrad von Hötzendorf, as explored in a recent excellent biography of Hötzendorf by Wolfgang Dornik, who lobbied for a “preventive war” against Serbia. This does not mean that they were unopposed.
The fear of national(ist) historians is that new historiography will might shift the blame to Serbia for the outbreak of the war and the figure of Princip. Indeed, recent books on World War One move away from the long dominant thesis of Fritz Fischer that German’s quest for global power was the prime cause of the war. The bestseller Sleepwalkers by Christoper Clark in particular locates the responsibility in all the major European capitals were key actors openly heading towards war (thus the title of the book is a bit misleading). However, the book also too easily links Serb nationalism in 1914 to the 1990s, as Andreas Ernst recently noted in the NZZ and thus also is careless in linking the interpretation of World War One to the recent past. This is exactly the implicit and explicit concern in Serbia, namely that the responsibility of Serbian nationalism for World War One also established guilt for the wars of the 1990s. However, interpreting the two events have to be kept apart to not fall into the trap of an ahistorical analysis of actors and specific circumstances.
The question over the monopoly of interpreting the war also effects the effort to have a scholarly debate over the war. The main academic conference on the war, “The Great War: Regional Approaches and Global Contexts”, to be held from 19-21.6.2014 in Sarajevo (disclaimer: I am a member of the organizing committee) was attacked for seeking to reinterpret the past. The former Bosnian ambassador to France and Egypt Slobodan Šoja, for example complained that the conference only brings together the losers of the war (the organizing committee includes research institutions from Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Hungary) and would not give sufficient honor to Gavrilo Princip, whom he had described in a hagiography of Princip in Slobodna Bosna as the “purest source of national power and its consciousness.” Of course, historiography should be neither concerned with determining whether Princip is a hero (or a terrorist for that matter). These controversies suggest that much of the discussion during the upcoming commemorations will not be shaped by reflecting on the past, but making use of the past for the present. As such, the present is catching up with the past.
Commemorating Gavrilo Princip in Socialist Yugoslavia:
“From this place on 28.6.1914 Gavrilo Princip through his shots expressed the people’s protest against tyranny and centuries-long aspiration of our people for freedom.”
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: World War One
Maria Falinaon the importance of paying attention to phrasing in museums
It would be utterly foolish to attempt a thorough description of what happened in Kamenets-Podolskii (or, in Ukrainian, Kamianets-Podilskyi), today a fair sized city in Ukraine. In earlier times it was an important Jewish center of learning, but even in Soviet times it was a multi-ethnic community of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. Internet descriptions of the city’s history always mention that Kamenets-Podolskii was the place where “one of the first and largest Holocaust mass-murders” took place. They usually also note that most of the 23,600 victims were Hungarian Jews.
Luckily there are some excellent English-language sources dealing with the subject. Among them is a volume devoted solely to the topic: Kinga Frojimovics’s I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land: The Hungarian State and Jewish Refugees in Hungary, 1933-1945 (2007), which is still available through Amazon. Randolph L. Braham’s monumental The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (1994) can still be obtained in an abbreviated edition. In Hungarian Tamás Majsai wrote a book about the deportations that took place in July-August 1941. I learned a lot from Mária Ormos’s Egy magyar médiavezér: Kozma Miklós, 2 vols. Kozma served at that time as a kind of governor of the territory, acquired in March 1939, which was known in Hungary as Kárpátalja or, in English, Carpatho-Ruthenia.
Yesterday I wrote that Sándor Szakály, the new director of the Veritas Historical Institute, called the deportation and murder of about 25,000 people a simple “police action against aliens.” It was not part of the Hungarian Holocaust. Why is it so important for Szakály and therefore, I suspect, for the Veritas Institute and the Orbán government to disassociate the 1941 atrocities from what happened after March 19, 1944, when allegedly Hungary lost its sovereignty? The answer, I think, is obvious. No one, not even far-right historians of Szakály’s ilk, can claim that Hungary was not a sovereign state in 1941. And yet with the approval and support of Miklós Horthy, László Bárdossy, the prime minister, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, minister of the interior, and Miklós Kozma, one of the promoters of the idea, all agreed to begin the deportation of Jews who had escaped from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria and after 1939 from Poland as well. In fact, although the official record of the cabinet meeting doesn’t indicate it, the whole cabinet gave the plan its blessing. The evidence can be found in notes jotted down by Miklós Kozma, who was present.
One must keep in mind that the northeastern corner of Greater Hungary was an underdeveloped region with a very large Orthodox Jewish community who were, especially in smaller towns, quite unassimilated. They were the ones Horthy hated most and wanted to get rid of. Kozma’s aversion to these people was most likely reinforced by living in the area. There were places where there were more religious Orthodox Jews than non-Jews. So, already in the fall of 1940 he entertained the idea of deporting them at the earliest opportunity, which came when Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. When Hungary joined the war effort on June 27 of the same year, conditions were ideal for the mass deportation of the unwanted Jews, foreign as well as domestic, because Hungarian troops were temporarily in possession of territories just across the border.
Hungarian gendarmes collected the victims, who were allowed to take along only 30 pengős and food for three days, herded them into cattle cars or in a few cases trucks, and took them to Kőrösmező/Yasinia, still inside of Hungary. The first group started to move across the border to Galicia and Ukraine on July 14. In the next few weeks 13,400 people were deported from Carpathian Ruthenia and 4,000 from other parts of the country, including Budapest. The majority of the deportees were taken to Kamenets-Podolskii by Hungarian soldiers, who took over the job of the gendarmes. Once there, the deportees were left to their own devices. No shelter, no food, no nothing. The few Jews in town tried to help, but they themselves were poor.
Soon enough the conditions became indescribable. Yet more and more transports arrived daily. Finally the Germans had had enough; they asked the Hungarian government to stop the deportations. In response, Keresztes-Fischer temporarily halted the deportation of Hungarian Jews, but the others continued to arrive daily in Kamenets-Podolskii. It was at that time that the Germans decided to “solve the problem.” They simply killed them and buried them in common graves. Some were still alive when they were thrown into the pit. A few Jews survived and even managed to get back to Hungary, although the Hungarian authorities doubled the number of gendarmes in order to prevent their return.
Deported Jews from Hungary in Kamenets-Podolskii / Source: http://www.memorialashoah.org
Yes, at the end of August the deportations stopped, but the Hungarian government didn’t give up the idea of resuming the deportations, especially from this particular corner of Hungary. László Bárdossy announced that because of the German request they halted the action but they have every intention of continuing it when the situation in that part of Galicia and Ukraine improves enough to accept the deportees.
Kamenets-Podolskiii was a dress rehearsal for the deportation of over 600,000 Hungarian citizens. Gendarmes were employed to gather and herd the victims into cattle cars in both cases. In 1944 as in 1941 the Hungarian authorities were the ones who seemed most eager to get rid of their Jewish citizens, and in both cases the Germans were the ones who tried to slow down the transports because they were overburdened.
So, it’s no wonder that the current Hungarian government wants to transform Kamenets-Podolskii into an innocent police action against illegal aliens. Sándor Szakály and the Orbán government are a perfect fit, and I’m certain that his Veritas Institute will do its level best to whitewash the Hungarian governments of the interwar period and make sure that Governor Miklós Horthy, whom Szakály seems to admire, is portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstances. And since soon enough all school books will be published by a state publishing house, I have no doubt that Szakály’s version of Hungary’s modern history will be the “true and only one.” After all, he is heading an institute called Veritas.
http://starshinazapasa.livejournal.com/732759.html
Я Аркадия-то давно читаю и знаю, как его всегда корежило от малейшего намека на национализм. Банил с двух рук не прицеливаясь. А тун вон, говорит, другой национализм увидел. С которым можно быть несогласным, но вместе добиваться общегражданских требований.A screenshot of The Literary City (via the San Francisco Chronicle)
OAKLAND, Calif. — San Francisco has become a city of gadgets, but it’s always been a city of letters. The town was central to the Beat movement in the 50′s, and the recent, city-wide SF Lit Crawl shed light on its wide variety of independent bookstores. According to Google Maps, there’s one Barnes and Noble in the city, in the tourist-friendly Fisherman’s Wharf, whereas a quick search on Yelp reveals a wide variety of indie stores throughout.
I was excited to learn recently about The Literary City, an interactive map developed by the San Francisco Chronicle and updated this year. Compiled by the Chronicle’s book editor, John McMurtrie, the map features booksellers, key locations (like Allen Ginsberg’s old apartment on Montgomery, where he wrote “Howl”), and passages about the city, and it’s a lovely reminder of the spirit of the Bay Area, which has so often celebrated freedom of expression. One peculiar dot in the middle of the Bay points to a passage from Maya Angelou from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:
“To San Franciscans, ‘the City That Knows How’ was the Bay, the fog, Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Top o’ the Mark, Chinatown, the Sunset District and so on and so forth and so white. To me, a thirteen-year-old Black girl, stalled by the South and Southern Black life style, the city was a state of beauty and a state of freedom.”
This project grows out of the jigsaw map of San Francisco that made the rounds last year, also developed by McMurtrie. Compiled with words and phrases about some of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods, it brought to life the way the city has been described and discussed over the years. Aside from their intrinsic value as a collection of literary history, maps like these also offer a window into how the narratives of the city continue in new forms in the 21st century.
I’m reminded of a recent New Yorker profile on the region’s entrepreneurial culture, where author Nathan Heller draws a direct line with the historical bohemian spirit of the city:
The youth, the upward dreams, the emphasis on life style over other status markers, the disdain for industrial hierarchy, the social benefits of good deeds and warm thoughts—only proper nouns distinguish this description from a portrait of the startup culture in the Bay Area today. It is startling to realize that urban tech life is the closest heir to the spirit of the sixties, and its creative efflorescence, that the country has so far produced.
Fittingly, the interactive Literary Map is made of collaborative, open source technologies like Open Street Map and Leaflet. These aren’t Bay Area technologies per se, but one could argue that they emerge out of the free software movement, whose origins can be traced in part to discussions and actions in the Bay Area like the Open Source Initiative in Palo Alto.
Jack Kerouac, of course, gets a passage, and his pin is dropped at the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge: “There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born.” It’s a story that continues today with the popular @KarlTheFog Twitter account, a perennial favorite for the tech-enabled in the city:
Summertime selfie: pic.twitter.com/J4T3t9mGKf
— Karl the Fog (@KarlTheFog) October 29, 2013
Meeting Room is a recent and powerful documentary concerning the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement, looking at those who stood up to drug dealers in the inner-city in the early 1980s. The film includes interviews with the late Tony Gregory, John ‘Whacker’ Humphries, Bernie Howard, Mick Rafferty, Padraig Yeates, Chris McCarthy and Fr Jim Smyth. This is a very important historical documentary which deserves a larger audience.
Christy Moore also features in the documentary, performing his song in honour of ‘Whacker’ Humphries.
Whacker Humphries took the dealers on
And he fought them tooth and nail
A squad of well armed soldiers brought him to the Portlaoise Jail
He tried to protect his children, found guilty of a crime
One man gets a pension, another man gets time