This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Dublin’s Millennium celebrations. The milk bottles remain, and so do the memories.

Among the most enduring images from 1988 are those of the giant Gulliver who was beached on Dollymount Strand, before floating on the River Liffey. An impressive “fibreglass, aluminium and plywood” tribute to the central character of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver was the work of Macnas, the much-loved Galway street performance company. It was a fitting tribute to one of Dublin’s finest writers, the great satirist Jonathan Swift, in a year that celebrated all things Dublin.

Gulliver on the Liffey (Image Credit: Dublin City Photographic Collection, Dublin City Council)

In January 1988, it was reported that the relatively new Macnas (they were founded two years earlier) intended to “travel to Dublin in March and liaise with different communities to capture volunteers all willing to help build the massive Gulliver model.” In keeping with the spirit of the year, they hoped that “the different parts of his body will be assembled at workshops throughout the city, with the help of 35 young craftspeople on a Fás scheme.”

The primary funding for Gulliver came from the National Lottery, who put an impressive £50,000 towards the project. The giant made his way onto the front of almost every daily newspaper in the country when he finally arrived on Dollymount Strand in July, with journalists getting into the spirit of things. The Evening Herald reported that “chaos broke out on Dollymount Strand this afternoon when a giant was spotted floating in the sea off the north Dublin beach…Experts called to the scene finally revealed that the huge man was in fact Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, direct from Dean Swift’s masterpiece story.”

Evening Herald, 12 July 1988.

This RTÉ report likewise played along, asking the children of Dublin where they felt the giant had come from. One child believed ‘Heaven’ to be the answer, and all were transfixed by the model and the pageantry that surrounded it. The captured Gulliver was freed and given a civic reception by Lord Mayor Ben Briscoe, before being placed in the Liffey between the Ha’penny Bridge and O’Connell Bridge, drawing huge crowds of the bemused and curious for a look.

The episode is recalled in recent literature, thanks to Frankie Gaffney’s novel Dublin Seven:

It only seems like yesterday ye were born, said his ma, getting misty-eyes. 1988…Dublin was a kip back then.But the week you were born, they’d big celebrations on for Dublin’s Millennium. They made these…special 50p pieces, cause Dublin was a thousand years old or somethin’, and when we were bringing ye back from the Rotunda they had a big huge giant floatin in the Liffey! Something to do with yer man Gullible’s travels it was!

Fittingly, Macnas also displayed Gulliver in their home city, where he drew big crowds on Grattan Beach. It was one of the first acts by a street performance company who have been captivating audiences ever since.

Gulliver in Galway (Image Credit: Macnas)

See the forthcoming Dublin Inquirer for an article examining the Millennium in more detail.

Irish Independent, 12 February 1958.

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster which claimed the lives of twenty-three people. On 6 February 1958, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed while attempting to take off in poor conditions at Munich-Riem Airport. Among the dead were eight of the Busby Babes, the remarkable young football side built by manager Matt Busby. It was a team that commentator Eamon Dunphy has recalled as being “proud, young and fearless.” The heartbreak in Manchester led to thousands taking to the streets there when bodies returned, with the Irish Examiner noting how “more than 100,000 people – men, women and children – lined the streets of the route from the airport to the ground in the biggest ever tribute paid by the people of Manchester.” The grief was not restricted to the red side of that city either, as Manchester City legend Frank Swift was also killed in the disaster.

One of the lives lost that day was Liam Whelan, a twenty-two year old from Cabra who had previously played with Home Farm in Whitehall. The return of his body to Ireland and subsequent funeral was a phenomenal spectacle, bringing Dublin’s northside to a halt. Bertie Ahern recalls the event in his autobiography:

Manchester United meant nothing to me as a six-year-old, but we were all brought out on the day of the funeral when it was on its way back in from the Christ the King in Cabra. We’re all very proud round here that he played for Home Farm longer than he played for United. He’s very much a local hero.It was a few years later before Manchester United started to reckon with me. At that stage, I was more interested in Drumcondra in the League of Ireland because they were the local side.

In signing for Manchester United in 1953, Whelan had followed in a long Irish tradition that began with Dubliner Patrick O’Connell in 1914. In a more contemporary sense, he followed the great Johnny Carey, who amassed more than 400 appearances for the club between 1936 and 1953, and whose escapades were closely followed in the Irish press.

Liam Whelan (Image Credit: Manchester United Football Club Archive)

The success of Busby’s United side – and the wonderful football they played – excited many in Ireland. More than forty thousand fans crammed into Dalymount Park in September 1957 to watch the side take on Shamrock Rovers in a competitive European clash. A hopeful sports reporter noted that “though a Dublin man and a Six-County man are in the visiting party, a good display will mean a lot to the prestige of Irish football.” Matt Busby – treating Rovers with a respect some in the English press felt they didn’t deserve – traveled to Dublin the week before the clash to watch the side, telling readers of his Evening Chronicle column in Manchester that “the Shamrock boys played some really grand football – no kick and rush and no unfair tactics. They showed good team work and a confidence born of a long run of success.” In the end, United ran out clear winners, with Whelan scoring twice in a six-nil victory. Rovers player Gerry Mackey remembered that there wasn’t much of a contest in the end, as “we ran ourselves into the ground. They scored three of their goals when we just couldn’t stand up anymore.” Mackey’s fellow Hoop Jimmy McCann recalled:

I can remember the crowds trying to get up the lane at Dalymount to get into the changing rooms. You had to almost beat your way up.

‘The whole country went bananas when Shamrock Rovers were drawn to play Manchester United. They had lots of great players such as David Pegg, Johnny Berry, and, of course, Duncan Edwards and Liam.

There was no shame in the defeat against such a superior side. United’s strikers just couldn’t stop scoring, leading the Sunday Independent to quip that “next to petrol, the most valuable commodity in England today is probably the Manchester United forward line.”

Evening Herald front page following the disaster,

When news of the tragedy reached Dublin, people began to gather at the Whelan family home in Cabra. The Irish Press reported that:

The tragic news of Liam Whelan’s death reached his family home at St.Attracta Road, Cabra,late last night, after hours of agonised waiting by his family… From the time the first reports of the disaster reached Dublin, crowds gathered at the Whelan home and phone calls for news of Liam were put through to Manchester at regular intervals on a phone in a neighbour’s house. Schoolboy friends waited silently, hoping against hope for the word that he survived.

Thousands lined the route as Whelan’s body arrived home on 10 February, taken from Dublin Airport to the Christ the King Church in Cabra. At the airport,a guard of honour from the Aer Lingus Association Football Club honoured the dead footballer. A larger guard of honour, made up of more than 250 players and volunteers from Home Farm awaited the body at Whitehall. Johnny Giles, then a young Manchester United player who would come to prominence in the aftermath of the tragedy, remembered that “Dublin, like Manchester, was under a pall of gloom. It couldn’t be any other way in a city with such a football tradition, a city full of kids like me, dreaming of playing for Manchester United.”

Liam’s funeral mass was delivered by Rev C. Mulholland,an RAF chaplain from England and a personal friend who was scheduled to have married the young footballer to his finance Ruby McCullough only a few short months later. The church, packed to capacity, included FAI President and Minister for Justice Oscar Traynor in its congregation, as well as representatives from right across the English and Irish footballing leagues. Sympathies came from GAA clubs too, with one spokesperson emphasising that “the players killed in the crash might have differed from us in their ideals, but they were sportsmen.”Liam’s body made the short journey from Cabra to Glasnevin Cemetery. To this very day, fans continue to leave United scarves and jerseys upon it.

The strong local pride in Liam Whelan is today reflected in the naming of  Cabra’s Liam Whelan Bridge, which includes a commemorative plaque unveiled by fellow Busby Babe Bobby Charlton in 2006. The Busby Babes would be remembered in poem and song, with Dubliner Dominic Behan penning ‘Manchester Mourns’ in the aftermath of the tragedy, while decades later Morrissey would sing of how “We love them, we mourn for them, unlucky boys of red.”

The outpouring of grief around Liam’s passing in Ireland – coupled with the spectacle of a packed Dalymount Park when the Busby Babes had played here just prior to the tragedy – no doubt contributed enormously to the support base Manchester United succeeded in building in this city, at a time when televised football (or even televisions!) remained a distant dream for many here.

Liam Whelan Bridge commemorative plaque, unveiled in 2006.

In Dublin 12, the John F. Kennedy Industrial Estate street signs remind southsiders of the June 1963 visit of JFK to this island. Across the River Liffey, and a different series of Americans are remembered in Coolock, where street names like Aldrin Walk, Armstrong Walk, Apollo Way and even Tranquility Grove honour (most of) the heroes of the 1969 Moon landing. This was total news to me until today, when I found it mentioned in both the print edition of the Dublin Inquirer and a lovely piece on thejournal.ie, complete with photos of street signs.

Digging into the archives, it’s easy to see how the street names came to be. Dublin, like the rest of the world, was fascinated by the journey of man into space. On the day after the great event, the Irish Press went out onto the streets to get the views of the ‘Plain People of Ireland’. All Patricia of Donnybrook could say was “We didn’t watch it on television because we don’t have a television”, and Susannah “couldn’t see any point in the whole exercise.” Thank God for Ballymun taxi man Gerard, who believed “a person would have to be very dense not to be interested in this fantastic achievement.”

When a tiny fragment of moon rock was put on display in the city in February 1970, more than 4,000 people showed up in just a few hours at the United States embassy building in Ballsbridge for a gawk. The tiny fragment was described by one journalist as being “about an-inch-and-a-half in diameter, or roughly the size of a walnut”. Still, it all had the feel of a great occasion about it, always enough for Dubliners.

When the Moon came to Ballsbridge, Irish Independent.

When Captain Eugene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17, arrived in Ireland in 1973, he brought with him a fragment of moon rock for President Childers, which he presented in Aras an Uachtarain. As pieces made appearances north and south in universities and at conferences, they continued to draw impressive crowds throughout the 1970s.

The street names in the Woodville Estate of Coolock were controversial from the beginning, leading the Evening Herald in the summer of 1977 to report that some residents at Woodville Estate were “slightly moon-sick”, calling for more “down-to-earth” names like Woodville Way and Woodville Avenue. Armstrong Walk, Aldrin Walk, and Collins Rendezvous honoured the men of the moon landing, while there was even a Tranquility Grove, in honour of the Statio Tranquillitatis where Apollo 11 landed.

Voting in a plebiscite on changing the names, residents rejected Collins Rendezvous for Woodville Court, but held onto the others. Thus, one member of the team was destined to be forgotten, in Coolock at least.

We eagerly await a Yuri Gagarin Avenue.

Google Maps showing Apollo Way, Tranquility Grove, Armstrong Walk and Aldrin Walk.

(In terms of crime and Dublin, we’ve previously looked at 18th century gang violence; Joy-riding in Dublin from 1918-39; War of Independence bank-robberies; the 1920s ‘Sons of Dawn‘ who were rounded up by the IRA; Animal Gang violence in 1942; vigilante violence in Dublin (1970 – 1984)  Bugsy Malone gangs of the 1970s and Triad gang violence in 1979) 

Introduction

The 1950s and 1960s are interesting decades in relation to crime in Dublin. They are the bridgeway between the Animal Gang street violence and bookmaking rackets of the 1940s and the emergence of modern organised crime from the late 1960s onwards.

One individual who was active through both eras was Charles ‘Charlie’ Ainscough. He was better known by his nickname ‘Henchico’. A relation of his explained to me via email that the name ‘Henchico’ derived “from the mispronunciation of Liberties people of the name Ainscough”. It is pronounced ‘Ainscow’ in its correct form.

His nom-de-guerre ‘Henchicho’ has been variously spelled as ‘Henseco’, ‘Henshcough’ and ‘Hinchito’ in contemporary newspapers. As well as ‘Henchicoe’, ‘Henchekow’, ‘Henchecote’ and ‘Henchcoat’ on different online platforms by reminiscing Dubliners. ‘The Hench’ is another nickname remembered by others on Facebook

Throughout his 25+ year criminal career, Henchico was involved in street-fights, shootings, stabbings, hatchet-attacks, house-robberies, larceny, pimping and various other illegal enterprises. He was in and out of prison his whole life. A feared figure, Henchico’s life of crime only came to end with a sudden fatal heart attack in 1968.

Family Background

The surname Ainscough is of “Old Norse, Scandinavian origin” and is a “locational surname deriving from a now ‘lost’ place in Lancashire, England.”

The ancestors of Henchico moved from England to Dublin in the 1860s to take up employment as coopers in the Guinness Brewery, St. James’s Gate, Dublin 8. At its height, Guinness employed up to 300 coopers who made a thousand new wooden casks a week and repaired thousands more. It took a seven-year apprentice to become a qualified cooper and they were the most highly skilled tradesmen in the brewery.

Cooper in the Guinness brewery, late 19th century. Credit – http://3.bp.blogspot.com/.

Henchico’s father, Charles Ainscough Sr., was born on 29 November 1892 at 3 Wyle’s Cottages to James Ainscough and Mary-Ellen Ainscough (neé Deane). Wylie’s Cottages, later known as Behan’s Cottages, were situated off Lower Basin Street and James Street in the shadows of the Guinness brewery. 

In 1901, the Ainscough family living in Dublin 8 were the only Ainscough family on the whole of the island. The head of the family James Ainscough (38), a London-born Cooper, lived with his Liverpool-born wife Mary-Ellen Ainscough (36) and four sons and four daughters including Charles Sr.

1901 Census Return. Ainscough family, 3 Behan’s Cottages.

James Ainscough died on 1 February 1904 according to the online Guinness archive. The same resource reveals that his son Charles Ainscough Sr. joined Guinness as a ‘Tariff Cooper’ on 16 August 1909 aged 17.

At the time of the 1911 census, the Ainscough family were still living at 3 Behan’s Cottages. Widow Mary-Ellen (46) lived in the home with three daughters, one daughter-in-law and three sons including Charles Sr.

1911 Census Returns. Ainscough family, 3 Behan’s Cottages.

Henchico’s uncle Henry Ainscough was listed as the main inhabitant householder the 1913 Electoral Register:

1913 Electoral Roll. Henry Ainscough, 3 Wylie’s Cottages (aka Behan’s Cottages).

Henchico’s parents Charles Ainscough Sr., of 3 Behan’s Cottages, and Christina Ainscough (neé McCann), of 32 Usher’s Quay, married on 7 November 1915 at St.f Audoen’s Church, Dublin 8.

1915 marriage cert of Henchico’s parents

Their son Henchico (Charles Jr.) was born around September 1925.

Here is a Google Map illustrating the various addresses in the city connected to Henchico throughout his life.

• Purple – Friends/Family/Hang-out spots
• Green – Enemies/Rival Gang Members
• Black – Sites of robberies and incidents

1940s

By the 1940s, the Ainscough family had moved from Behan’s Cottages around the corner to 2 Newport Street. This is the sole address associated with Henchico for the rest of his life.

Derelict Cottage, Newport Street (1980s). Credit – Dublin City Council Photographic Collection

At the age of only 16, Henchico took part in the infamous Tolka Park battle on 23 March 1942 between members of the southside Ash Street ‘Animal Gang’ and the rival northside Stafford Street (now Wolfe Tone Street) ‘Animal Gang’. The brawl took place during the semi-final football game between Mountain View and St. Stephen’s United in the Junior Combination Cup. Knives, crowbars, flagpoles, rusty swords, iron bars and chair-legs were used in the trouble, according to historian Kevin C. Kearns.

Henchico and many others were arrested and found guilty of “conspiring, assault and malicious wounding”. He was the youngest person to be charged and was sentenced to eight months hard labour. His co-accused, as revealed in the Irish Press (26 March 1942), were:

Southside (Ash Street gang)

• Laurence McCabe (26), Ash Street
• James Walsh (21), 4 Ash Street
• John Weldon (19), 68 Meath Street
• Patrick Walsh (18), 4 Ash Street
• Charles Ainscough (16), 2 Newport Street

Northside (Stafford Street gang)

• Joseph Gahon (23), 15 Lower Dominick Street
• John Early (22), 38 Stafford Street (now Wolfe Tone Street)
• John Kelly (22), Strafford Street (now Wolfe Tone Street)
• Thomas Grant (20); 7 Ormond Square
• John Manley (18), 15 Stafford Street (now Wolfe Tone Street)
• John Leonard (17), 17 Little Mary Street

Following his release from jail, Henchico moved to England and joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the height of World War II. The young Dubliner made the newspapers, not for daring Spitfire bravery, but for a drunken argument that resulted in the shooting of an officer. In 1944, Henchico was charged in a court in Brackley, Northamptonshire with attempted murder following the shooting of a New Zealand-born Flying Officer named Jack Bryan Small at a RAF base in the Midlands. Newspapers reported that Henchico was known to his comrades as the ‘Singing Irishman’. As recorded in the Banbury Advertiser (24 May 1944), he was sentenced to five-years penal servitude.

The Northampton Mercury, 17 March 1944.

Henchico was only around 20 years old when his father Charles Sr. died in 1946. Needless to say this would have not helped the mindset of an already troubled youngster.

It is unclear how much jail time Henchico served but he was back in Dublin by 1948. That year Henchico was sentenced to 12 months in jail with hard labour for breaking into a number of shops on Lower Abbey Street. As reported in The Irish Times (3 July 1948), his conspirator was Patrick Carr (22), a tailor, from Tonguefield, Kimmage.

A year later, an interesting detail was given away in The Irish Times (28 Nov 1949). An article about a car/van collision in Crumlin revealed that one of the injured parties was “Charles Henseco” aged 23, a “cart driver”, of 2 Newport Street. This confirmed in print for the first time that this very unusual nickname was directly connected to Charles Ainscough of that address.

1950s

In 1950, Henchico was fined £20 for interference with the mechanism of a motorcar in Sutton. The Irish Times (5 July 1950) revealed that he had been previously sentenced to five years imprisonment for armed robbery in England but this is likely to have been mixed up with the RAF officer shooting incident.

In 1951, Henchico and three other men were arrested and charged with breaking into the home of Roy and Maureen Black at 19 The Rise, Mount Merrion and stealing goods worth over £2,000. The gang also robbed clothing from 3 Wilfield Park, Ballsbridge. The Irish Times (25 Jan 1951) listed the other individuals involved as:

• Thomas Dowling (21),no occupation, of 23 St Enda’s Road, Terenure
• William Kelly (19), no occupation, of 64 Bridgefoot Street
• Joseph Enright (23), labourer, of 27 Island Street

Later that same year, Henchico was found guilty of breaking into the premises of Resnick’s clothing factory, Upper Dominick Street and stealing £116 in cash. He was sentenced to 20 months hard labour. The Irish Press (12 May 1951) noted that Henchico, aged about 25, had already seven previous criminal convictions.

In July 1951, Henchico was convicted of housebreaking offences “involving property valued at several thousand pounds” and sentenced to threeyears penal servitude. His companion Cyril Francis Laverty (20), no business or fixed address, received 20 months hard labour while Thomas Dowling (21), no occupation, of 23 St Enda’s Road, Terenure received 18 months hard labour. According to the Irish Press (17 July 1951), Henchico was already serving a 20 month sentence which would run concurrently with the three years imposed on him for this latest offence.

The Irish Press, 14 July 1951.

Henchico’s mother Christina Ainscough died in March 1952, leaving him parentless.

In May 1956, Henchico was charged with breaking into two jewellery shops – Patrick D. Leamy, 3 South Anne Street, stealing goods worth £1,369 and Gerald Campbell, 32 Lower Ormond Street, robbing £83 worth of stock. Henchico was sentenced in October to two years imprisonment for these offences.

Brendan Raynor (19), of 229 St. Attracta Road, Cabra admitted that he was involved in the robbery and was sentenced to 11 months. Following his arrest in Birmingham, he told the local police that : “I won’t say anything until I get back to Dublin and see ‘Hinchito’”–  The Irish Times, 2 July 1956. The other members of the gang: James Corrigan (20), of no fixed address, received 10 months and Michael Jones (20), of no fixed address, was sentenced to 10 months.

Evening Herald, 30 June 1956.

The Irish Independent (6 Oct 1956) reported that Philip Wyatt (19), of Cashel Road, Crumlin was found ‘not guilty’ of having £400 worth of jewellery, knowing it to be stolen from Patrick D. Leamy’s shop. He told police that he had been asked to deliver the jewellery wrapped in a sock and handkerchief to a man in a pub on St. Augustine Street named “Charles Ainscough or Henshcough”. The Evening Herald spelt it ‘Hinchito’.

Irish Press, 5 October 1956

In May 1958, Henchico and two other men broke into Margaret Gregory’s shop in Newtownkennedy, County Wicklow and stole goods worth £106. Henchico was sentenced to three years in jail. James Wilson (26), of 51 Queen Street, received two years while William McLoughlin (24), of Paul Street, got one year. The Irish Times (13 Nov 1958) noted that James Wilson had been sentenced to 14 years imprisonment in 1952 for the shooting of  a man during an armed bank robbery in Cornmarket, Dublin and was released in late 1957.

On 17 February 1959, The Irish Times reported that Henchico was sentenced to a further 12 months imprisonment after pleading guilty to a another 11 charges of housebreaking.

1960s

The Irish Times (16 Feb 1960) reported that Henchico had pleaded not guilty to breaking and entering a shop at 43 Pimlico in the Coombe during the previous November and stealing cigarettes and goods worth £15.

In June 1962, Henchico was involved in the larceny of 18 cases of whiskey worth £303 from the British and Irish Steam Packet Co. Ltd., North Wall and £688 worth of clothing from Alpha Bargains, 67 Aungier Street. The Irish Press (4 Dec 1962) reported that he was sentenced to 15 months in jail.

A series of violent incidents in 1962 broke the cycle of robberies and break-ins that had been occurring since the late 1940s.

On 2 June 1962, Henchico was assaulted by three men outside 23 Nicholas Street between Patrick Street and Christchurch. The Northside culprits were:

• James Martin (34), of 25F St. Michan’s House, Greek Street – three months imprisonment
• Joseph Larkin (29), of St. Jarlath’s Road, Cabra – 1 month suspended sentence
• John Davis (28), of Alfred Byrne House, Greenville Street – 1 month suspended sentence

The Irish Times (19 Sep 1962) reported that two Gardaí  had witnessed Henchico “talking to a number of youths” on the path on Nicholas Street when a van pulled up. Three men emerged and attacked Henchico who was brought to Adelaide Hospital where he received seven stitches.

On 8 July 1962, William Moore, of 106 Kylemore Road, Ballyfermot, was attacked with a hatchet by Henchico on the Ballyfermot Road. Moore received four stitches to a cut above his eye. The Irish Times (25 Oct 1962) reported that Henchico was convicted and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. The judge told him that he was lucky, due to the seriousness of the incident, that he was not standing in the dock charged with manslaughter or murder.

On 16 September 1962, Leo Tougher, of Glenealy Road, Crumlin, was stabbed by Henchico “from his hair to the opening of his lip” outside the Rob Roy café, Harrington Street in Portobello, Dublin 8. He had to undergo an operation to remove his left eye.

Evening Herald, 16 October 1962.

The Irish Press (18 Sep 1962) reported that five young men were arrested in relation to the vicious assault:

• Charles Ainscough (38), 2 Newport Street
• Edward Simpson (22), Clogher Road, Crumlin
• Terence Lynch (22), 2 St Audeon’s Terrace, Christchurch, Dublin 8
• Thomas Quinn (22), Usher’s Island
• Nicholas Muldoon (18), Rosary Road, Maryland, Dublin 8

The group was charged with maliciously wounding with intent to “disfigure and disable” Leo Togher, amongst other charges. Garda Lugs Branigan described it as a case of “gang warfare” in the Dublin District Court. It was brought up in Court that Henchico had 24 previous convictions dating back to 1941. It is also worth noting that how much older Henchico was compared to his gang of four juveniles, the youngest of whom was 20 years younger than him.

Later in the same year, The Irish Times (17 Nov 1962) reported that Henchico was found not guilty by a jury of receiving 5,000 cigarettes knowing them to be stolen. The article noted that Henchico was a patron of the Last Post café, 12 Ellis Quay.

Last Post, 12 Ellis Quay, Dublin, 1988. Credit – David Jazay / Slate.com

In folk memory, this late-night café was a popular rendezvous spot for Henchico and his gang. On a side note, the restaurant was owned by Polish Holocaust survivor Jan Kaminski who also ran The Baggot Mews restaurant.

The Evening Herald reported on 15 February 1965 that Henchico pleaded guilty to receiving 18 men’s suits and other clothing that had been stolen from a Ballyfermot cleaning firm.

Life of crime comes to an end

Throughout the 20th century, Benburb Street in Dublin 7 was one of the centres for street prostitution on the northside of the city. Kevin C. Kearns, in his 2014 biography of famed policeman Lugs Branigan, described Henchico as a “runty small-time kingpin” who used to hang around Benburb Street with his cronies “like a fly circling a rubbish heap”. Henchico was apparently “cunning and convincing enough to be rarely caught” for his crimes but this is somewhat contradicted by the sheer amount of court-cases reported in the newspapers. Former policeman John Collins called him a “small, little guy, in his thirties or forties … who knew everyone, all the scumbags in Dublin”.

Many of the policeman who talked to Kevin C. Kearns admitted that Henchico was “unique – an impressively ‘shadowy’ figure” who was “involved in all sorts of illicit dealings”. They described him as a “pimp” who the women on the street “feared … terribly”. He was called an “underworld figure”  byBernard Neary in his 1985 biography of Lugs Branigan.

Charles ‘Henchico’ Ainscough collapsed and died of a heart attack on 13 February 1968 near Benburb Street, Dublin 7. He was only 42 and it’s unclear whether there were any underlying health issues.

Death notice for Charles Ainscough (aka Henchico). Evening Herald, 14 February 1968.

Historian Bernard Neary noted that ‘Lugs’ Branigan was the one to discover his body. He brought it to hospital and then:

… reported the matter to the appropriate Garda authorities and before leaving the hospital removed all possessions including £700 in cash from the dead man and gave them to the night nurse, telling her to give them to nobody and put them in safe keeping for the investigating Gardaí.

The next day Jim called into Jervis Street and the nurse told him that after he left the dead man’s wife called and asked for the money, as her husband had forgotten to leave any money in the house and she had to put food on the table. “Did you give her any money?” asked Jim. “No, Sergeant, I did just as you told me”. “Good, for he has no wife, he never married”. “

Henchico’s removal Mass took place in St. Catherine’s Church, Meath Street and he was afterwards buried in Mount Jerome cemetery, Harold’s Cross.

Conclusion

Lugs Branigan’s comment that Henchico “never married” is of interest as there are strong rumours amongst people I’ve talked to online and offline that he was gay. He certainly wouldn’t have been the first gay or bi-sexual gangster. For example, Ronnie Kray in 1950s/60s London or Dominic Noonan in 1980/90s Manchester.  Historian John Gibney makes reference in a 2012 Irish Independent article to Henchico’s “soft, feminine voice”. A number of Dubliners online have spoken about the fact that the older Henchico wholeheartedly enjoyed the company of the younger boys who hung at his coat-tails and did his bidding.

It is no surprise that someone who was involved in crime for over 25 years is remembered in the folk memory of the city. I spoke online to Ken Donohue from the northside who many decades ago went out with a girl from Dolphin House, Dublin 8. That’s how he first heard of Henchico and his gang. Donohue told me that he would have to have his:

wits about (him) walking from Rialto [Dublin 8] to Bolton Street [Dublin 7] three times a week in case (he) came across them as you could get a hiding just for the sake of it, especially if it was known that you were a northsider .. he was a psycho – no question about that. His reputation would have been known around the north city but he seldom ventured over”

Declan Mulligan recalled on Facebook:

Growing up on Faussagh Road, Cabra in the late sixties early seventies, we knew all about Henchico and the Animal Gang. Around the block on St. Jarlath Road, where my granny lived, there was the famous Joseph Messey Larkin who had apparently battered Henchico in Nichols Street. And at about the age of 9 my Da decided that I needed to toughen up so he brought me over to Arbour Hill Boxing Club for lessons, where I was introduced to Mister James Brannigan, also referred to by those less respectful as ‘Lugs’ ! He gave me plenty of tips at the time.

While musician Brendan Bonass wrote:

When I was in a group called ‘Rockhouse with Fran Byrne, Paul Brady, we played in a place called ‘The Cavalier Club’ off Harcourt Street. Charlie Henchico’s name often came up. There was a suggestion that he was involved in the club somehow … There was always a hush when his name came up…

Henchico was somewhat unique in that he was feared underworld figure in an era that is associated with poverty, unemployment and emigration, but not necessarily criminality. ‘Dublin in the Rare Old Times’ is remembered as an age when doors were unlocked and the streets were safe for children and older people to roam freely.

If Henchico had lived, there is a strong possibility that he could have emerged as a serious player in organised crime in the 1970s. He certainly would have had the experience, the contacts and the reputation. I would argue that he should be seen as one of the major career criminals in Dublin of the immediate generation before the likes of Tony ‘King Scum’ Felloni and Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne. Felloni started off with small-time blackmailing in the early 1960s to house-breaking and robberies in the late 1960s and finally to large-scale drug-dealing in the 1970s and 1980s.

Older Dubliners on Facebook, since this article was first published, have commented that they’ve heard the syaing “he’s some Henchio” being used as derogatory term for a “gurrier-wannabee hard man”.

Legendary guitarist and lyricist Pete Holidai, formerly of The Radiators from Space, released a 2014 single with The Trouble Pilgrims titled ‘Animal Gang Blues’. He references Henchico, his hatchet and policeman Lugs ‘Branno’ Branigan. I will leave you with those great lyrics:

Emerging from the shadows
With a high-pitched serenade
Henchico concealing
A sharpened hatchet blade
Smell the piss and poverty
Driving the despair
When Branno watches over them
No weapons to declare

Wendy Wood (1892 -1981) was a remarkable woman. A committed Scottish nationalist and separatist, she was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, which later became the Scottish National Party. Fond of a political stunt, she seized upon Bannockburn Day (the celebration of a Scottish military victory) in 1932 to lead a gang of protesting Scottish nationalists into Stirling Castle, tearing down its Union flag and raising a Scottish flag in its place. She later recalled how “I held the wad of red, white and blue in my hand….I thought of Gandhi facing death, of Connolly, of young Pearse, or Burmese driven to wander, of frightened Arabs, or broken faith with Egypt.”

Scottish nationalism, much like its Irish equivalent, produced a wide variety of ideologies. Even the SNP, today a social democratic party, produced a pamphlet in the 1930s which warned of the ‘Green Terror’ of Irish migration. Still, Wood was firmly of the left, and was arrested for protesting against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt movement in the 1930s. She remained politically active into subsequent decades, even going on hungerstrike in 1972 to demand Home Rule for Scotland.

Wendy Wood, by Florence St John Cadell, National Galleries of Scotland.

Not long after her escapades at Stirling Castle, Wood arrived in Dublin, something she details in her autobiography I Like Life. Boarding a ship in Glasgow, she was captivated by Dublin from the very beginning, though she viewed the island through rose-tinted glasses:

The names of the streets, the public notices and the advertisements in Gaelic thrilled me and I never read the bracketed translations any more than I would spoil a visit to France by searching for English. The indefinable feeling of a ‘capital’ centre of direction, the core of a genuine working culture as reflected in Dublin,  made the memory of Edinburgh, even with its beauty, seem insipid in comparison.

On a brief visit to the capital, Wood appears to have visited the Dáil, the St. Enda’s School of Pearse and attended a meeting of Cumann na mBan. The beautiful St. Enda’s school remained as a model to the ideas of Patrick Pearse, though it struggled financially to sustain itself and would not make it to the end of the decade. Wood recounted an encounter with a sister of Pearse, who murmured that “one must try to forgive.” She was struck by the artifacts on display, including “the block on which a patriot had been executed by the Saxon”, this being the block on which Robert Emmet’s head was reputed to have been severed from his body, and at which Michael Collins sold ‘Dáil Bonds’ to prominent republicans during the War of Independence.

Of the Dáil, Wood writes of the body as if it was still the revolutionary gathering of the Mansion House and not the considerably more timid Leinster House assembly. She found it to be “a dignified but simple and business-like gathering which even with its limited powers, made the London House of Commons appear like a mad hatters’ tea party.” She was struck by how “the artistry and skill of the Celt showed in all printed matter, in decoration and in fabrics, and in the patterned carpets in the Dáil.” The monument of Queen Victoria outside the parliament (today sitting outside a shopping centre in Australia) was a surprise,though she joked of how “an Irishman explained that it was such an insult to the Queen that it seemed a pity to blow it up.”

If the Dáil was a great symbol of Irishness to Wood, there were others who rejected its very being. She attended “a meeting of the Irish Women” and was struck by the intensity of feeling. The Dublin of the early 1930s seemed to her an exciting place, if not slightly dangerous:

That night I was at a friend’s house where a few had gathered that we might exchange views. coffee was being handed round when a revolver shot was heard down the street. Had it been in Scotland everyone would have left to their feet with exclamations. In Dublin, no one moved…

As the late Bob Purdie rightly noted, there was a certain irony in Wood being so moved both by the Dáil and the meeting of Cumann na mBan:

She seems not to have thought it significant that she was the guest of an organisation which aimed to overthrow the political institution she had just been admiring from the gallery. She was like an amnesiac, wandering around not understanding the history of what she was seeing, but judging only on the basis of immediate impressions.

To Wood, Dublin was a city where she saw her vision of a future Scotland, with its native language being spoken in formalities, where she could rejoice “in the good designs of the Irish coins” and where there was “a determined spirit of self-sacrifice amongst all ranks.” While to many in Irish public life (like Seán Ó Faoláin and Peadar O’Donnell, both veterans of the revolution) the Ireland of the 1930s was a failure of a revolutionary vision, to her it was its realisation.

Not all Scottish nationalists would be so welcomed in the Dublin of the 1930s. In 1939, the curious separatist Ronald MacDonald Douglas arrived in Ireland on board his yacht the Ron Bhan and with his family.  MacDonald Douglas, who had previously sought Nazi assistance for the cause of Scottish separatism, attracted the attention of military intelligence, who noted that “he is clearly an adventurer, an intriguer and potentially dangerous, and his deportation is recommended.”

Wendy Wood embodied a different political tradition however. To her, James Connolly resonated as clearly as Robert Burns or William Wallace.

(In a 2014 article, I looked at more generally Dublin’s historic drinking dens, early houses, kips, shebeens and bona-fide pubs.)

In the 1980s and 1990s, three self-proclaimed Irish republican and socialist political parties operated drinking clubs in Dublin city centre.

Official Sinn Féin (later The Workers Party) operated ‘Club Uí Chadhain’ in the basement of 28 Gardiner Place. Originally set up as a “cultural club” for Irish language enthusiasts, the venue was just a couple doors away from the party headquarters at no. 30.

The club was named after the Irish Language writer and 1940s IRA Volunteer Máirtín Ó Cadhain who died in 1970. The space hosted film-showings, trad music nights and social evenings. It was raided by the police in January 1975 with leading Official SF member Frank Ross (aka Proinsias De Rossa), the occupier of the premises, being fined £50 for keeping unlicensed alcohol for sale.

I’ve been told that it was very popular with non-political GAA fans when it opened on match days at Croke Park. In the early 70s,  they used have a stall outside it on match days selling Irish rebel LP’s and republican badges.

On 18 November 1984, career criminal Eamon Kelly stabbed and almost killed prominent WP member and (future general secretary) Patrick Quearney on the street outside. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail which was later reduced to 3 years following an appeal. Kelly was shot dead by the RIRA in 2012.

As far as I know, the basement club is still owned by the Workers Party but has not been open since around 2006.

Irish Independent, 5 June 1975

Irish Independent, 13 April 1990

Irish Press, 15 April 1993

Any stories, memories or insight? As always, please leave a comment.

Jackie Carey, Liam Whelan, Johnny Giles, Tony Dunne, Paul McGrath.

What binds all of these men? They are all great Irish footballers who played for Manchester United, yes, but they were also all spotted by Billy Behan. As the primary talent scout for United in Ireland over several decades, Behan made no small contribution to the success of the Mancunian football giants, and no small contribution to youth football in Dublin. From a family steeped in association football, remarkably little has been written about a man who perhaps knew the game better than anyone else in the Irish capital.

Billy Behan as goalkeeper, Evening Herald.

Born in Dublin in 1911, Billy Behan was the son of William Behan, a founding member of Shamrock Rovers. Unsurprisingly, he and his siblings developed a love of the beautiful game, with Billy playing as goalkeeper for Westland Rovers, Shamrock Rovers and Shelbourne during his career in the domestic game. At 22 years of age, he signed for Manchester United in 1933, beginning an affiliation with the club which would last several decades.

A young Behan spent only one season at Manchester as a goalkeeper, though he met his wife Vera in the northern English city,  remembering that “although my star in Manchester was a brief one, it fashioned my future.” Returning to the familiar green and white hoops of Shamrock Rovers, Behan maintained strong contacts with United, and began informing the club scouts of players in the domestic Irish game he believed warranted a chance. When United scout Louis Rocca agreed to accompany Behan to watch St. James’s Gate and Cork in the Iveagh Grounds, Behan’s worth could not be doubted. Playing that day was a young Jackie Carey, destined to become a famed Manchester United player. There was a degree of luck in it all, as Rocca had actually come to Dublin to see Benny Gaughran, who had been snatched instead by Celtic. Still, Carey dominated the game and caught the eye of the visitor, and Behan recalled:

Through the co-operation of the Gate Secretary, Mr. Byrne, Louis Rocca was introduced to Jackie Carry that evening and after discussions agreed to join United for what was then regarded as a record fee for a Free State League player. That fee, believe it or not, was only three figures and Carey, who was to make for himself such an illustrious career with United, must be regarded as the greatest bargain of all time to come out of Ireland.

Jackie Carey (Image Credit: Manchester United Archive)

To English footballing fans, Jackie Carey became the great Johnny Carey. He was an integral part of the club from 1936 until 1953, captaining the team from 1946. The first Irishman to captain a winning side in an FA Cup Final and the English First Division, Carey became a household name both in England and at home, coming a long way from the youngster who had lined up in the blue and navy jersey of Dublin’s  Gaelic footballers at minor level. In the words of Eamon Dunphy, “to the Irish soccer community of the forties and fifties, Johnny Carey was more than a sporting hero. He was an iconic figure for reasons that had as much to do with national identity as sport.” During the Second World War, Carey lined-up in Dublin for a League of Ireland XI and made a guest appearance for Shamrock Rovers, drawing huge crowds eager to see the famed Dubliner.

Behan’s great love was junior football, where he nurtured and encouraged talent. In 1946 he managed Saint Patrick’s CYMS, who succeeded in winning the FAI Junior Cup in Dalymount Park, and several players from his side attracted the attention of British sides. Across the sea, things were about to change forever at Manchester United with the appointment of Matt Busby, a manager who, like Behan, believed firmly in the importance of a solid youth system in football. To Behan:

Matt Busby’s inheritance at Old Trafford in 1945 was bleak – the club had a bank overdraft of £15,000, and a crater in the middle of the ground from the Blitz which had also left the stands a shambles, forcing them to play their home games at Maine Road. Yet Matt, from the start, built up a network of contacts, throughout the home countries, which kept him briefed on available talent.

The incredible team that Matt Busby built became the ‘Busby Babes’, a name bestowed upon them by the Manchester Evening News but quickly adopted on the terraces. The team would dominate British football.  Giles Oakley, author of Red Matters: Fifty Years Supporting Manchester United, captures the essence of the Busby philosophy:

Youthful talent was supported, nurtured, trusted and encouraged at Old Trafford in a way that was strikingly unique and distinctive. Over 75 players from the youth ranks got their chance in the first team in the 25 years Sir Matt was manger. Even those who didn’t ultimately make the grade at United often had good careers elsewhere.

Cabra’s Liam Whelan, who perished in the Munich air disaster.

Central to the Busby force was Cabra lad Liam Whelan, who Bill Behan observed while playing for Home Farm. Behan had arrived at a Home Farm game seeking out Vinny Ryan, normally a wing half who had recently moved to centre forward and was scoring to beat the band, but it was Whelan instead who impressed (United did make an unsuccessful bid for Ryan).  Only nine days after the scoop of the Cabra youngster, he played a star role in a United Youths convincing 7-1  victory over Wolves. Behan later acknowledged the magnitude of Home Farm’s importance to junior football:

Hereabout I would like to make reference to Home Farm, the club described by Sir Matt Busby as the best organised amateur sports team in the world.  Home Farm is undoubtedly the finest club of its kind. …As they say in racing, class will always tell.

Like many in the Irish and British football communities, Behan was stunned by the horror of the Munich air disaster, which ripped the heart of an incredible team. The scout attended the funeral of Whelan in Cabra, but also the remembrance services in Manchester, finding the city to be in deep mourning, but also witnessing the great spirit of resilience that makes Mancunians the people they are:

I found a city shocked and numbed. I just cannot describe the pall that hung over Manchester then, for at the time I don’t think anyone was thinking clearly…. Bobby Charlton reported back a short while afterwards and was a great asset. If anyone became a man overnight it was Bobby, whose mother spent some time helping out at Old Trafford after Munich. She’s a grand person and I think she makes the best cup of tea in England.

One of the finest accounts of Billy Behan and the manner in which he operated, seeing talent like Whelan and Carey early on, comes from Johnny Giles. Behan had enormous respect for Johnny Giles, noting that “Dicky Giles (Johnny’s father), knew the game inside out, and Johnny understood what is was all about at a very early age.” Giles described Behan in his entertaining autobiography as:

…having a kind of sixth sense for identifying the players who would make it, a bit like the way they say Vincent O’Brien could look at a yearling and in his minds eye see a Derby winner. At United, they valued their Irish links, not least because of the caliber of player that Billy Behan had found for them….Billy would be moseying around the junior football matches of Dublin, either standing on the sidelines of referring matches, a football man to the core. And he was not just a talent spotter, he was an amiable man who was good at fostering relationships with a young players family.

Crucially, and if time allowed it, Behan tried to establish direct contact between the upper-echelons of Manchester United and the players families. Jimmy Holmes recounts in his autobiography being taken to meet Matt Busby in the Gresham Hotel. Other clubs learned the lessons of this approach; right before Holmes departed Dublin for Manchester, he opened his front door to see Noel Cantwell, the manager of Coventry City and former Manchester United and Ireland defender. He told him, rightly or wrongly, that busloads of kids went to United on a regular basis and never get invited back. Holmes went with Coventry instead.

A young Johnny Giles at Manchester United. Evening Herald.

Behan could look back with pride on his contribution to Manchester United. In a reflective piece published in 1968, he stated that “I take pride in the fact that emigrant Irish soccer players by their character, sportsmanship and general behaviour in England have done so much towards raising the prestige and standing of Irishmen generally in England.”

Billy Behan died in 1991. In the decades that followed his above penned reflections, he had remained steadfastly involved in Irish football at junior level, and involving himself with the Leinster Senior League. He scouted, he was a sometime referee, he did literally anything and everything he could for the game. He continued to identify young talent, including the Black Pearl of Inchicore, Paul McGrath. Johnny Giles noted in the Evening Herald  at the time of his passing that “the sad loss of Billy Behan will leave a void in football that will be felt by many people who love the game in these islands and more keenly in Manchester, the great man’s adopted city.” His friend Tommy Cullen remembered how “I don’t think he ever had an enemy. He can never be replaced, he was the gentleman of football.”

George Desmond Hodnett (Image Credit)

Next Sunday marks the centenary of the birth of George Desmond Hodnett, a man who lived a colourful life on several fronts. A guest on the first ever edition of The Late Late Show, he was part of the Bohemian set of 1950s Dublin, primarily known as a pianist and composer at the popular Pike Theatre.  He was also a distinguished music critic with The Irish Times, with an unrivaled knowledge of jazz music. Known to many as Hoddy, a review of his appearance on The Late Late Show noted:

Hoddy brought to the show a splendid touch of almost baroque eccentricity. Now  living in London, he was snaffled for the Late Late Show at a few hours notice. He entertained both studio audience and the viewer at home with a delightful line of talk about everything from the proceeding vulgarisation of O’Connell Street  to his own view on copy-writing, a job he is currently doing in London.

A Dubliner by birth, he enjoyed a decidedly middle class youth, educated at the private Catholic University School on Leeson Street and Trinity College Dublin. He never finished his studies at Trinity, instead falling into the Dublin set of the day, frequently to be found in McDaid’s or the so-called Catacombs where drinking could continue into all hours.

Irish Times journalist Deaglan De Breadun remembered of him:

A talented composer and musician, he played jazz piano, trumpet and, of all things, zither. Perhaps he learnt to play it from his Swiss-born mother, Lauré. The instrument became briefly fashionable thanks to the Orson Welles movie, The Third Man and, at the time, George was probably the only zither-player in the country.

He cut a most unusual shape, and Frank Kilfeather recalled that “from his dress, to his conversation, to his peculiar habits, Hoddy was a character. If he hadn’t existed, the most brilliant fiction writer couldn’t invent him. He always wore two overcoats and two jumpers, even in the middle of summer.”

In the 1950s, Hoddy was a loved part of the repertoire of the Pike Theatre, penning and performing satirical tunes for revues at the venue, where he worked as resident pianist. I won’t say much about the Pike Theatre, because it will be returned to again on the blog, but it was a necessary institution in the Ireland of its day that pushed boundaries and offered a platform to sometimes sidelined voices. In the words of Brian Fallon, writing about the 1950s (a decade that is  often wrongly considered a grey one in Irish culture), “most of the laurels for the decade belong to the gallant little Pike: for its staging of Behan’s masterpiece, for mounting Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the following year and for its 1957 performance of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo which led to its actors appearing in court under a police prosecution for indecency.” Located in Herbert Lane, the theatre was the great vision of Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift. It was making an impact at a time when the mainstream theatre world was offering little. In Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and The Rose Tattoo, it’s noted wryly that “when the Abbey burned down in 1951, it was popularly joked that the fire was the first flame of any kind to light the place up for many years.”

One great Hoddy original was Monto, popularly known now as ‘Take Her Up To Monto’. In his own words, it was a satire of many folk songs of its day, though he noted in one interview that its popularity reached a point “when it has become the folk song it originally aimed at satirising.”

If you somehow haven’t heard it here it is in all of its glory:

Popularised by The Dubliners, the song takes it title from Montgomery Street, located in the heart of what was Dublin’s thriving red light district of the Victorian age.  Immortalised as ‘Nighttown’ in Ulysses, the district became notorious enough to warrant a mention in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1903:

Dublin furnishes an exception to the usual practice in the UK. In that city the police permit ‘open houses’ confined to one street; but carried on more publicly than even in the south of Europe or in Algeria.

By the time Hoddy penned Monto, the district was no more, relegated to folk memory thanks to a high profile Garda raid in 1925 and the efforts of the Legion of Mary. In Monto, Hoddy managed to squeeze in not only Monto itself but plenty of stories from the Victorian age, including the distant war in South Africa and the Phoenix Park murders. It is the Second Boer War in particular that leaps out from the song, with Victoria’s visit to Ireland during the conflict mentioned, along with the rather unfortunate Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who had a horrid time in South Africa, as Fusiliers’ Arch recalls. 

In an entertaining (they always are) Irishman’s Diary on the song, Frank McNally quoted Hoddy himself explaining that:

The verses were constructed to include the pre-possessions that would appeal to the Dublin proletarian taste….Hence the ingredients of hurler-on-the-fence; support for persons regarded as patriots (Invincibles verse); anti-police attitudes (‘the buggers in the depot’); anti-‘toff’ attitudes (Buckshot Forster); anti-Englishness (same); local allusions; and, of course, smut. This construction probably accounts for the song’s success, if that is the word.

Well, if you’ve got a wing-o,
Take her up to Ring-o
Where the waxies sing-o all the day;
If you’ve had your fill of porter, And you can’t go any further
Give your man the order: “Back to the Quay!”
And take her up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Take her up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

Have you heard of Buckshot Forster,
The dirty old impostor
Took a mot and lost her, up the Furry Glen.
He first put on his bowler
And buttoned up his trousers,
Then whistled for a growler and he said, “My man!”
Take me up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Take me up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

You’ve seen the Dublin Fusiliers,
The dirty old bamboozeleers,
De Wet’ll kill them chiselers, one, two, three.
Marching from the Linen Hall
There’s one for every cannonball,
And Vicky’s going to send them all, o’er the sea.
But first go up to Monto, Monto, Monto
March them up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

When Carey told on Skin-the-goat,
O’Donnell caught him on the boat
He wished he’d never been afloat, the dirty skite.
It wasn’t very sensible
To tell on the Invincibles
They stand up for their principles, day and night.
And you’ll find them all in Monto, Monto, Monto
Standing up in Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

Now when the Tsar of Russia
And the King of Prussia
Landed in the Phoenix in a big balloon,
They asked the police band
To play “The Wearin’ of the Green”
But the buggers from the depot didn’t know the tune.
So they both went up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Scarpered up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!

The Queen she came to call on us,
She wanted to see all of us
I’m glad she didn’t fall on us, she’s eighteen stone.
“Mister Me Lord Mayor,” says she,
“Is this all you’ve got to show me?”
“Why, no ma’am there’s some more to see, Póg mo thóin! (Kiss my arse)”
And he took her up Monto, Monto, Monto
He set her up in Monto, lan-ge-roo,
For you!

The inclusion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers may have been a nod towards Oliver St. John Gogarty, who rather cleverly suggested that Monto was where soldiers returning from the Boer War would be heading upon arrival back in Dublin. A poem entitled The Irish Yeoman’s Return, or Love is Lord of All appeared in the pages of the rather conservative Irish Society newspaper in 1901. On first glance, it was patriotic stuff:

The Gallant Irish yeoman
Home from the war has come
Each victory gained o’er foeman
Why should our bards be dumb.

How shall we sing their praises
Our glory in their deeds
Renowned their worth amazes
Empire their prowess needs.

So to Old Ireland’s hearts and homes
We welcome now our own brave boys
In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes
Love’s heroes share once more our joys.

Love is the Lord of all just now
Be he the husband, lover, son,
Each dauntless soul recalls the vow
By which not fame, but love was won.

United now in fond embrace
Salute with joy each well-loved face
Yeoman: in women’s hearts you hold the place.

Reading the first letter of each line downwards, it read: The Whores Will Be Busy. Though sent anonymously, it was the work of Oliver St. John Gogarty, then a young medical student in Trinity College Dublin. Not unlike James Joyce, he had a familiarity with the Monto himself.

Hoddy’s song referenced both heroes and villains in an Irish context. Take the mentioned de Wet for example. The famed Boer general Christiaan de Wet achieved something of a legendary status among Irish nationalists in the early twentieth century. In his Bureau of Military History Witness Statement, Irish Volunteer Patrick O’Reilly recounted:

I was five years of age in 1900, when the Boer War was raging. My recollections of the period are very vivid. The neighbours around who gathered at our house in the evenings discussed with vigour the pros and cons of the war, All were in favour of the Boers and had the greatest contempt for the British. The weekly papers, giving details of the fighting, would be read and re-read several times. In all these discussions, we youngsters became familiar with such tiaras as Kruger, De Wet, Cronge. Horses and dogs were named after those heroes.

The song caught the attention of Luke Kelly, finding its way onto the Dubliners Finnegan Wakes LP, released in 1966. Featuring what many regard as the iconic Dubliners line-up (Ronnie Drew, Barney McKenna, John Sheehan, Ciarán Bourke and Luke Kelly), it was a live recording from Dublin’s Gate Theatre in April of that year. It was an immediate crowd pleaser, destined to remain in The Dubliners set-list for decades to come.

Finnegan Wakes (ItsTheDubliners)

Hoddy died in September 1990, leaving behind a fine collection of reviews and writings in The Irish Times. More than anything however, ‘Monto’ remains. In 2016, singer Róisín Murphy christened her album Take Her Up To Monto, remembering that her uncle was a photographer with The Irish Times who knew Hoddy personally. To her:

Take Her Up to Monto is a very satirical song. I don’t really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn’t. It’s a bit cheeky calling it Take Her Up to Monto, but the whole idea was to be very irreverent. My da used to sing Take Her Up to Monto to me when we were walking down the street – he still does actually – because it’s got a walking tempo, and I still sing it to myself when I’m walking along. So it’s a little postmodern fragment, a bit of history.

The Turkish Baths of 1860, Lincoln Place, Dublin. Our story today concerns an early forerunner of these Turkish Baths. (Image: Archiseek)

In the Dublin of the late eighteenth century, Achmet Borumborad cut an unusual shape. A tall Turkish man sporting a fine beard and wearing traditional Turkish attire, Jonah Barrington (judge, lawyer and Dublin socialite) remembered him as “being extremely handsome without any approach to the tawdry, and crowned with an immense turban, he drew the eyes of every passersby; I must say that I have never myself seen a more stately-looking Turk since that period.”

Borbumborad was literally followed through the streets of the capital by the curious, with Barrington relating how “the eccentricity of the doctor’s appearance was, indeed, as will be readily be imagined, the occasion of much idle observation and conjecture. At first, wherever he went,a crowd of people, chiefly boys,was sure to attend him, but at a respectful distance”.

A doctor by profession with immaculate English, Borbumboard quickly made his way into the upper echelons of Dublin society, wining and dining with the elite of the College Green Parliament, gaining a reputation as a fine conversationalist who was “pregnant with anecdote, but discreet in its expenditure.” He is mentioned in contemporary publications, with a poem entitled The Medical Review from 1775 describing “his foreign accent, head close-shaved or sheard. His flowing whiskers, and great length of beard.”

While the period calls to mind the privileged dueling ‘Bucks’ of Trinity College, sedan chairs on College Green and the occasional riot in the Smock Alley Theatre, eighteenth century Dublin had its fair share of poverty and misery too, evident from primary sources like the survey census of the city carried out by the Reverend James Whitelaw in the summer of discontent that was 1798. Whitelaw was horrified to report:

I have frequently surprised from ten to 16 persons, of all ages and sexes, in a room, not 15 feet square, stretched on a wad of filthy straw, swarming with vermin, and without any covering, save the wretched rags that constituted their wearing apparel. Under such circumstances, it is not extraordinary, that I should have frequently found from 30 to 50 individuals in a house.

While groundbreaking work on the infectious nature of disease (such as that carried out by Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde) remained a long way off in the distance, many contemporary observers in the eighteenth century were aware of the poor health of the less well-off inhabitants of Dublin. Borbumborad, the man from God knows where, was among such voices. Barrington recounts how “he proposed to establish what was greatly wanted at that time in the Irish metropolis, ‘Hot and Cold Sea-water Baths’, and by way of advancing his pretensions to public encouragement, offered to open free baths for the poor on an extensive plan, giving them as a doctor attendance and advice gratis every day in the year.”

Jonah Barrington, responsible for some of the most entertaining and colourful memoirs of late eighteenth century Dublin.

With public subscription, Borbumborad succeeded in opening his Turkish Baths beside Bachelor’s Walk in October 1771, supported by dozens of parliamentarians, surgeons and physicians. The baths were a great success, Barrington proclaiming that “a more ingenious or useful establishment could not be formed in any metropolis.” Borumborad constructed “an immense cold bath…to communicate with the River, it was large and deep, and entirely renewed every tide. The neatest lodging rooms for those patients who chose to remain during a course of bathing were added to the establishment, and always occupied.”

Given Borbumborad’s popularity with the elite of the city, it became the doctor’s “invariable custom to give a grand dinner at the baths to a large number of his patrons, members of Parliament who were in the habit of proposing and supporting his grants.” Barrington recounts a great tale of one such gathering ending in disaster, when a pissed-up parliamentarian, Sir John S. Hamilton, inadvertently found himself in a bath, opening the wrong door “when splash at once comes Sir John, not into the street, but into the great cold bath, the door of which he had retreated by in mistake!” The ridiculous circumstances of a parliamentarian falling into the baths and others rushing in to his rescue greatly damaged Borbumborad’s standing among the chattering classes of the capital.

In addition to the Bachelor’s Walk Turkish Baths, Borbumborad had also operated a sort of health spa at Finglas, where he built “baths and a pump house”, convinced of the healing powers of a local well. Well beyond the city, it says something of Borbumborad’s reputation that some traveled the distance to it on account of what he himself said of the wells healing powers.

Achmet Borumborad’s story then is one of a medical professional, socialite and exotic outsider in the Dublin of the eighteenth century. Or is it? The learned philanthropist who had escaped from Constantinople was, alas, revealed to be a total invention. Having fallen in love, he revealed himself to his partner, falling to his knees and proclaiming himself not only a Christian, but “your own countryman, sure enough! Mr. Patrick Joyce, from Kilkenny County, the devil a Turk any more than yourself, my sweet angel!”.

Borbumborad vanished from the historical record, to such an extent that when Barrington wrote his colourful memoir of the late eighteenth century, he had to inform readers that “I regret that I never inquired as to Joyce’s subsequent career, nor can I say whether he is or not still in the land of the living.”

Did he ever exist at all? In 1956, Desmond Ryan took up the story for the Irish Press,  suggesting that while aspects of Barrington’s tale may be fabricated, there is indeed evidence of the “celebrated pseudo-Turk” in the contemporary press, with the Freeman’s Journal in particular pouring praise onto the Turkish baths. Drawing on the work of the great historian of eighteenth century Ireland, Dr. R.B Madden, Ryan was convinced that not only was the Borumborad name an invention of a colorful Irishman, so was Patrick  Joyce! In reality, it seems the great pretender was a Dublin-based tradesman named William Cairns. What became of him, nobody seems to know. Borbumborard’s Dictionary of Irish Biography entry ends by noting he was “no more than an opportunist seeking to make his fortune by elaborate means, a far from unusual human characteristic, and a common career path in the 18th century.”

Eventually, the Turkish baths at Lincoln Place came along, with their distinctive appearance leading to them being refereed to as “the Mosques of the baths” in Ulysses. They were a far cry from Borumborad’s experiment by the Liffey, but it is they that are today remembered thanks to James Joyce and others.

Noel Hughes, Moore Street 2017. (Image: Las Fallon)

Like many people we were saddened to hear of the passing of Noel ‘Chalky’ Hughes this week.

A veteran of the ‘Operation Harvest’ Border Campaign of the 1950s, Noel was a committed republican and a very proud Dubliner. For many years he conducted walking tours of Glasnevin Cemetery, and also provided tours of the Dublin 7 area which was his home through many decades. We were lucky enough to set out on one of these tours with Noel, from the familiar setting of The Cobblestone, taking in the Smithfield Market,Church Street and more besides. Chalky was centrally involved to many commemorations in the capital over decades, where he was a familiar sight with the ‘Dublin Brigade – Oglaidh na hÉireann’ flag.

Noel contributed two videos to the Storymap oral history project, recalling his youth in the Coleraine Street/Smithfield area:

Allow me to tip my Magee cap in the direction of Simon Conway. Man about town, DJ, promoter and publican (behind Lucky’s on Meath Street and The Yacht in Ringsend) his insistence led to us putting together this forthcoming evening of chat.

Ringsend is an area with a strong football heritage, the birthplace of both Shelbourne and Shamrock Rovers. It is also associated with some remarkable players and footballing figures like Billy Behan, recently examined on the blog.

This forthcoming night is a chance to talk about some of that history. Eoghan Rice is the author of We Are Rovers, which remains one of the finest League of Ireland books, right up there with There’s Only One Red Army (examining the other SRFC).Fergus Dowd from the Patrick O’Connell memorial fund will talk about the forthcoming documentary ‘The Man Who Saved Barcelona’ and the Patrick O’Connell Memorial Fund. We’ll be showing the extended trailer for that forthcoming documentary, as well as the wonderful ‘In My Book, You Should Be Ahead’, which examines Shels.

The poster is a magnificent tribute to both the beautiful game and Ringsend, all credit to Manus Jude Sweeney.

Dublin’s newest plaques were unveiled today on the Frank Flood Bridge, Drumcondra. They commemorate a young and fearless IRA Active Service Unit commander, a mere 19 years of age at the time of his execution. A student of University College Dublin, Flood was among the ‘Forgotten Ten’, buried in Mountjoy Prison until a state funeral in 2001 saw the men reburied in Glasnevin cemetery.

I was asked to say a few words today to put Frank Flood in context and to explain the importance of the Active Service Unit in the War of Independence:

Frank Flood, in some ways, was an unlikely radical. The son of a policeman, he was a very capable student of the same university attended by his friend Kevin Barry. Before this, he had been a student of the CBS North Richmond Street school, and perhaps therein lies the answer. This remarkable school was attended by republicans as diverse as Ernie O’Malley, Seán Heuston, Éamonn Ceannt and Sean Lemass. It was an atmosphere that nurtured nationalism.

If radicalism was found closer to home, it was in his siblings. Seán Flood, a brother, was a member of the 1st Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, serving under Ned Daly in 1916 and throughout the subsequent years of struggle. Young Frank, born in December 1901, joined the Volunteer movement in the aftermath of the Rising in 1917. The family lived at 19 Summerhill Parade. Six Flood siblings played a part in the revolutionary period.

Flood proved capable of balancing student life with his involvement in the Republican movement. An active member of the college Literary and Historical Society, he involved himself in college life, in a university that could count Seán MacBride, Sean Ó Faoláin, Kevin Barry and Todd Andrews among its student body.  On the day Kevin Barry was hanged, young Seán MacBride was among those to raise a tricolour to half mast over the university, leading to a military raid on the college.

Flood was a quick rising star of the IRA, which found itself operating in difficult terrain in Dublin city centre, far removed from the rural hills and valleys of the Flying Columns. Flood was among the men who raided King’s Inn’s for arms in June of 1920, securing a Lewis gun among other captured items. Such acts were a morale boost to the movement, as well as providing crucially important arms.

Flood was among the participants in the Church Street Ambush in September 1920, when British soldiers at Monks Bakery were fired upon by an IRA party, resulting in several fatalities. A young Kevin Barry, hiding under a lorry in the confusion that followed the attack, was captured at the site. Barry’s sister later recalled Frank Flood’s heartbreak at Barry’s detention, insisting to her on several occasions that he and his comrades would do all in their power to break him out.

The creation of the IRA’s Active Service Unit in Dublin was a landmark moment in the conflict. As James Harpur recalled, “it was the intention of the Army Council to increase the activities of the I.R.A. and to counter increased British activities in Dublin, and to this end the Active Service Unit was being formed.” Harpur recounted being addressed by Oscar Traynor, and “he informed us that the
British were becoming a bit too ‘cocky’ in the city and were being allowed too much freedom of movement to carry out their policy of subduing the population, and that it had been decided to counter this activity on their part by giving them battle on our own ground.” It was dangerous and stressful work; ASU member Patrick Collins recalled Traynor telling the men “if any man felt that the work now or in the future would cause him too great a strain he was free to withdraw at any time without any reflection on him.”

Flood immediately took a prominent leadership position in the northside ASU’s. On the 21 January 1921, Flood led an IRA ambush party near to here. Dermot O’Sullivan, a surviving participant, recounted the events of that day in his Bureau of Military History Witness Statement:

On the 21st January, 1921, No. 1 Section was detailed to take up positions at Binn’s Bridge, Drumcondra, at 8.30 a.m. and to ambush a party of Black & Tans which usually came into the city at that time from Gormanstown….

 …The  Section Commander’s instructions for the attack on the Tan lorry were that the lorry was to be allowed to pass through our first pair of men and when it came in line with the -pair located on the north side of Binns Bridge they were to open fire on it. We were all to fire simultaneously likewise when it came abreast of our positions. The entire Section remained in position until 9.30 and as no Tan lorry came our way within that time the Section Commander decided to withdraw to a position further down the Drumcondra Road in the vicinity of Clonturk Park.

 The detection of the IRA men in the area by a passing police man created a dilemma, and the DMP man continued on his way, no doubt altering authorities. O’Sullivan recalled their decision to  attack a military van which approached from the Whitehall direction. O’Sullivan’s Witness Statement tells us:

Almost simultaneously with the arrival of the van we noticed that an armoured car and a few lorries of military were coming in our direction from the city and another armoured car and some lorries were also approaching our position from Whitehall direction. It was clear to us then that someone must have summoned the aid of the military and Tans as the place seemed to be surrounded. We saw there was nothing for it but to get out as quickly as we could, so we made our way down Richmond Road in the direction of Ballybough with the intention of cutting across country towards Clontarf. As we reached the junction of Gracepark Road we saw two tenders of Black & Tans approaching us from the Ballybough direction. We wheeled up Gracepark Road and into Gracepark Gardens. At that time Clonturk Park was open country. A Lewis gun which had opened fire at some of our section crossing Clonturk Park (which was not then a built-up area) could have brought us under fire. In fact, one of our men, McGee, was killed as he was trying to get away.

Hopelessly surrounded, most of the remaining the men  surrendered. The following day they were interrogated by intelligence agents from the Castle, with O’Sullivan recalling Frank Flood was “Struck across the face with a butt of a revolver and told to take the grin off his face.” Despite their efforts, their interrogators learned nothing of the inner-functions of the ASU, which was quickly attacking crown forces on the streets of the capital again.

O’Sullivan lived to tell that tale, his life being spared on the basis of his youth, though one could hardly consider Flood and his comrades old men. Four of the party which participated in the planned ambush were executed on the 14 March 1921. They were:

Patrick Doyle, aged 29

Francis Xavier Flood, aged 19

Thomas Bryan, aged 24

Bernard ‘Bertie’ Ryan, aged 21.

The crime for which Frank Flood was executed was ‘High Treason’, yet he had acted not out of any sense of treason, but loyalty to the idea of the Republic proclaimed at Easter Week, and reaffirmed in the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil. In the words of Canon Waters inside the prison, these condemned men “walked to the scaffold like lions.”

In recognition of their contribution, the men were rightly reburied in Glasnevin cemetery in 2001. Let this new memorial, like their prominent resisting place there, remind Dubliners of their bravery and heroism.

The crossroads of Ballybough Road and Clonliffe Road will be known to many Dubliners who make their way to and from Croke Park to watch Dublin compete. Today dominated by large advertising boards on what is prime advertising real estate, there is nothing to indicate the rather macabre history of the corner, which it seems was once home to a so-called ‘Suicide Plot’. This was essentially an unconsecrated burial location in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for those who took their own lives, as well as the occasional outlaw. It has entered local folklore, and was even mentioned in the Dail in 1990 by a TD who commented “there is also a suicide burial plot in the area and it is said that spirits are still in the park beside the Luke Kelly Bridge.”

Google Street view of the corner in July 2014. It has since been improved and includes recreational seating.

Ballybough’s name derives from the Irish language ‘Baile Bocht‘, meaning ‘poor town’. Before urban development, the district from Ballybough to North Strand was known colloquially as Mud Island, with the Rev. John Kingston noting in a 1950s piece that “Ballybough had an evil reputation during the eighteenth century…Beside the bridge was a noted suicide plot, where the bodies of suicides were interred in the time honoured fashion, transfixed with stakes, which according to belief, effectually prevented these unhappy beings from wandering about and alarming the public.”

There was little sympathy or understanding in most cases for those who took their own lives in earlier centuries. In an interesting History Ireland feature on Theobald Wolfe Tone, who made the decision to take his own life rather than face the death of a criminal, Georgina Laragy rightly notes that “At the time of his death suicide was a mortal sin, condemned by both Catholic and Protestant churches, and a crime under common law. It was punishable by burial at the crossroads with a stake through the heart, and the confiscation of one’s goods and chattels (both these punishments were overturned by legislation in 1823 and 1872 respectively).” Tone, a formidable political figure, was buried in consecrated ground at Bodenstown in Kildare, which very much defied the norm for such a death.  Felo de se, or ‘Felon of himself’, was the archaic legal term used to describe those who took their own lives.

Curiously little has been written about the site, with most of what has appeared in print bring rooted primarily in local lore. In his popular Dublin history The Labour and the Royal, Eamonn MacThomáis talks of Larry Clinch, an early nineteenth century highwayman figure, who was hanged in the vicinity following a shootout with militia men in November 1806: “The bodies of Larry and his gang were left lying on Clonfliffe Road to warn all other highwaymen. Later they were buried at the end of Clonliffe Road, at Ballybough Crossroads. Down the years many people have reported seeing a strange horseman rising up and down Clonfliffe Road late at night.”

A 1939 local history feature from the Irish Independent eludes to Larry Clinch and the “suicides’ ground at Ballybough.”

In Dublin, facts need not always interfere with stories of course, and the manner in which the plot is remembered (and even geographically placed) by locals is important in itself. It is certainly something most locals of a certain vintage seem to have at least heard of, which is interesting given the absence of a historic marker. The excellent East Wall for All blog has speculated on its potential literary importance, but there is undoubtedly a lot more work to be done.

Evening Herald, 15 May 1968.

Much will be written in the weeks ahead internationally about May 1968, and the student demonstrations which gripped France. They have achieved something of a legendary status in popular culture,  with the striking graphic posters and slogans of the student movement finding their way into mainstream consciousness. La barricade ferme la rue mais ouvre la voie appeared on Parisian walls, declaring that ‘the barricade blocks the street but opens the way.’

The Stone Roses later adopted the iconic lemon logo of the band on the basis of singer Ian Brown’s obsession with the May ’68 events, learning that lemons were carried by student demonstrators who believed them to nullify the effects of tear gas. Brown recalled that:

When we were in Paris we met this 65-year-old man who told us that if you suck a lemon it cancels out the effects of CS gas. He still thought that the government in France could be overthrown one day; he’d been there in ’68 and everything. So he always carried a lemon with him so he could help out at the front. Sixty-five – what a brilliant attitude.

Of course, angry students were not confined to the occupied universities of Paris in 1968. In the United States, students formed an important part of the Civil Rights movement, while in the North of Ireland People’s Democracy emerged in the later stage of the year, primarily from young activists in Queens University Belfast. To be a student in 1968, it seemed, was to be an activist.

 For what it’s worth, the students in France didn’t think much of the Ireland of the day. At several occupations, they watched the film The Rocky Road to Dublin, Peter Lennon’s great documentary that asked the fundamentally important question of “what do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?” The film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which came to an abrupt end that year owing to the discontent that swept the country. It inspired more than one fierce debate in an occupied classroom.

In Dublin, Trinity College Dublin students made headlines in 1968 for their opposition to the visit of King Baudouin of Belgium to the university. It was a time when there was something of a buzz around the Left on the campus, with John Stephenson later recalling how “in the mid-sixties there was a pronounced progressive tendency in the student body.  Not since the Forties Prometheans had there been such a strong Leftist surge.” Central to the story were the Internationalists, a small Maoist grouping on campus who troubled the college authorities and puzzled some in the press beyond the walls of the university that had produced Edmund Burke and Edward Carson. Nusight reported that they “lived communally, shared all their earnings, rose at a certain time for pre-breakfast study sessions, and often worked an 18 hour day bill-posting around the city or stapling magazines.”

Trinity News coverage of the event.

A great introduction to the Internationalists comes from Dublin Opinion,  detailing the origins of the small Maoist organisation inside the university. They produced a periodical Words and Comment, and became heavily active in political campaigns both inside and outside the university. They attracted the immediate suspicion of the Trinity News publication, who sought to prevent them as cultish, telling readers in November 1967 that “it is seemingly against ’party policy’ to establish emotional ties with anyone outside their ideology. Marriage and other stable relationships are disapproved of if they take up time and energy that could be used to further the aims of the group.”

In truth, they reflected the growing popularity of Maoism among student radicals across the European continent, who grew increasingly weary of the Soviet Union in light of the Sino-Soviet split, and found much inspiration in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. To the students in France, the French Communist Party was old and stale, and the Soviet Union corrupted. Mao’s image adorned the courtyard of the occupied Sorbonne in Paris, just as he appeared in the pages of the Internationalists publications in Dublin. Not all in the university shared the enthusiasm of the Internationalists for Mao, evident from reports like this one:

Trinity News, February 1968.

The King of Belgium arriving in Dublin was the first time Royalty of any kind had stepped foot on  Irish soil (in the 26 Counties at least) since the departure of the British Empire. King Baudouin arrived in Ireland and did all the things a visiting head of state does, right down to playing a bit of hurling with the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch. The media were hopeful the world would see all of this, as in the words of The Irish Times it would “serve as a reminder to one of the members of the EEC, and indirectly to the other five, not only of our political existence but of our individuality.”

Belgium’s historic role in the Congo did not win it favour with the student radicals of the day, who very much pointed the figure of blame at the country for  the killing of independent Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was a popular anti-colonial figure who became a martyr in the eyes of a radicalised generation of students. When the King arrived in Trinity College Dublin to view the Book of Kells on 14 May, students from the Internationalists awaited with a banner declaring in French “Lumumba killed by Belgian imperialists.” Police moved in to clear the banner, leading to some scenes of minor violence.

The Herald wrote:

A three-deep “blue wall” of uniformed Gardaí clashed head-on with hundreds of wildly demonstration students chanting anti-Belgian slogans and waving banners at Trinity College today, while the King and Queen of the Belgians were visiting the college.  Several hundred Gardaí moved in to reinforce the big concentration inside the college as scuffles broke out between Gardaí and a small group of students chanting ‘Down with Belgian Imperialism.’

Things quickly spiraled out of control, certainly there were innocent bystanders caught in the melee as hundreds of Gardaí descended on Trinity, and a protest the later condemning the violence and the bias of the Evening Herald article was much larger than the initial demonstration. The student protesters were condemned by their own, with Trinity News proclaiming:

There is no doubt at all that the police were justified in moving in to break up the demonstration – their duty was to protect the Royal couple. Whether the police used too much force is a matter of opinion. But it must be remembered that many of them were in a situation that they never handled before, so panic was inevitable.

Protesting students at the office of the Evening Herald.

To some, the scenes in Trinity College were frightening evidence of a student radicalism creeping into Dublin that was not unlike that witnessed in France. Trinity College met the Internationalists head on, suspending leading members from the university, though the Provost insisted there were “few colleges more democratic than this.” The presence of an Internationalist bookshop led to the headline ‘MAO BADGES FREE WITH BOOKS’, while a retired army officer eve announced that “in my opinion foreign students who riot or demonstrate with violence should be deported.” Trinity was not quite the Sorbonne, but maybe some in the Evening Herald wished it was.

Evening Herald, October 1968.

Hester Dowden (1868-1949)

There is a curious hidden history surrounding early Irish spiritual mediums, who tended to be women of considerable influence. Hester Dowden, daughter of Irish literary scholar Edward Dowden, claimed to be in contact with the spirit of Oscar Wilde and other illustrious figures. Geraldine Cummins, a distinguished playwright, convinced the American Ambassador to Ireland during the Second World War that she was in direct contact with President Roosevelt’s late mother and former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Ambassador Gray took it all seriously enough to write home from Dublin that that “assuming these comments do come from friends who have passed on, I think they should be treated exactly as advice from friends who are still here.”

The late nineteenth century witnessed a global wave of interest in occultism, spiritualism and in mediumship. In an Irish context, William Butler Yeats is undoubtedly the most celebrated figure to have indulged in it all, as a firm believer in automatic writing and a member of the ‘Ghost Club’ in London. The idea that the dead both had the ability and inclination to speak with the living was a powerful one. The great Harry Houdini would later set out to debunk those he believed were little more than “vultures who prey on the bereaved”, but in the second half of the nineteenth-century converts to the concept of mediumship included leading chemists, physicists and the occasional Nobel laureate. The Evening Herald didn’t buy it, telling readers:

Don’t waste time on spiritualism, for if you wish to demonstrate that you are a first class imbecile you can give no better proof than by parting with your money to so-called professors of occultism who pretend to hold communication with the dead. What strange foolishness sends men and women to ignorant, illiterate, fraudulent mediums in search of ghosts and spirits!

Dubliner Hester Dowden published Voices from the Void (1919) and Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (1923), receiving significant international attention for the later. Dowden’s father was a much respected literary critic and academic, which had provided her access to a world of writers. Beginning her career as a medium in London, her introduction to Voices form the Void was not by any means sensationalist, informing readers that:

Those who are willing to devote some of their time to the study of what is commonly called spiritualism should bear in mind that results are slow, uncertain, and cannot be forced. Indeed, one asks on self whether time is well spent seeking for the few grains of gold one finds in the huge dust heaps of disappointment and dullness.

There was nothing dull in Dowden’s Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde, a collection of claimed automated correspondence with Wilde. Within its pages, she stated that Wilde took a poor view of Joyce’s Ulysses when quizzed on the recently published and then hotly debated work:

Yes, I have smeared my fingers with that vast work. It has given me one exquisite moment of amusement. I gathered that if I hoped to retain my reputation as an intelligent shade, open to new ideas, I must pursue this volume. It is a singular matter that a countryman of mine should have produced this great bulk of filth.

 She claimed too that Wilde told her “being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is, if one excepts being married or dining with a schoolmaster.” Joyce, not to be outdone, parodied it all in Finnegan’s Wake, where Wilde talks gibberish through a medium.

Geraldine Cummins (1890-1969)

Perhaps the most widely known Irish medium was Geraldine Cummins, a Corkonian born in 1890 who was many things in one life time. A very capable and talented writer, she wrote three plays for the Abbey – including a comedy – and published a novel, but gradually focused more and more on mediumship. Her influence was significant enough to perhaps impact on US foreign policy. When US Ambassador to Ireland David Gray participated in a number of seances with Cummins, he believed her claims to be in communication with spirits that included former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who had served as Chief Secretary for Ireland and resided in the same home. Balfour provided his own analysis of contemporary events, which were forwarded to the US President by Ambassador Gray. President Roosevelt’s reaction was not dismissive; he informed Gray that to his mind “these are real contributions and I hope you will continue.”

Unsurprisingly in Catholic Ireland, there was frequent denunciation of those who engaged in such behaviour, with the Ouija board specifically denounced on more than one occasion. Created by American lawyer and inventor Elijah Bond, the ‘Talking Board’ launched in February 1891, first marketed as a parlour game. The more common name, it was later claimed, came from an ancient Egyptian word ‘Ouija’, meaning ‘Good Luck’. A flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the letters 0-9 and the words ‘Yes’ , ‘No’ and ‘Goodbye’, Elijah’s grave actually includes the markers of a Ouija Board carved into its stonework.

That the board exploded in commercial popularity around the time of the First World War says much about the tremendous hurt of the time, when men were dying in their hundreds of thousands on foreign battlefields and the very idea of a body to bury was out of the question for most. In November 1919, the Freeman’s Journal wrote of how against the backdrop of such trauma on an unprecedented scale, “one might be tempted to transfer one’s allegiance to crystal gazers, palmists, table-rappers, the manipulators of Ouija boards, and such like exponents of the new credulity.”

The leading opponent of all of this in popular culture was the great Harry Houdini, a legend in his own lifetime and ours, remembered for his escape acts and as the greatest illusionist of all time. There was seemingly nothing the man couldn’t work his way out of, and he had drawn large crowds to see his performances in person in Belfast in 1909. Like many people, Houdini wanted to believe. Before his death he had actually agreed with his wife that if he somehow did find it possible to communicate with her after death, he would and that they would have a secret code, with the message being simply ‘Rosabelle, believe’. His widow held a yearly séance on Halloween for ten years after Houdini’s death, in the hope he’d make contact. In his lifetime, Houdini, like a lot of people who approach this field, had gone into it with a broken heart with the death of his mother in the 1920s, and he became convinced that those telling him he could communicate with her had no way of doing it and were merely frauds. When he toured America in 1925, he offered $10,000 to anyone who could exhibit supernatural phenomena that he could not replicate himself. By the time of his death, he had done much to undo the reputations of mediums the world over. Yet some, like Ambassador Gray in the Phoenix Park, continued to believe.

My grá for Herbert Simms is well known. Dublin’s Housing Architect from 1932 until 1948, this year marks the 120th anniversary of his birth, as well as the 70th anniversary of his tragic suicide. We have previously examined Simms on the blog. He understood the complexities of public housing and public needs, telling a housing committee in 1935 that “you cannot re-house a population of 15,000 people, as in the Crumlin scheme, without providing for the other necessities and amenities of life.” His beautiful Art Deco housing schemes dot both sides of the River Liffey today, a reminder of his vision.

Along with a Committee that includes some remarkable academics and friends, I am happy to present the Call For Papers for #Simms120 here. Please do get involved. We will be fine-tuning it all in the weeks ahead, but the conference looks set to happen in October and it will be open to the public. If you live in a Simms scheme, or are just generally curious about the history of housing in Dublin, you’re more than welcome. Details to follow.

Housing and how it is provided remains a vital issue across the city of Dublin today. Where and how we should provide housing for a changing population are some of the most pressing issues facing the city. Housing builds community and it develops a sense of place for these communities. As the current challenges in housing show, building houses is more than just an adequate number of rooms. It is one of the main ways that the city’s population retains a sense of itself.

2018 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Herbert George Simms. Through his work with Dublin Corporation, Simms was responsible for some of the most elegant and highest quality housing that remains in Dublin city to the present day. From Cabra, Crumlin and in the heart of the city, Simms’ work and vision for Dublin are still present. Their presence is not just about housing, but fostering communities.

To recall his work, and in light of the significant challlenges that face housing in the present, this set of events will draw together some of the main ideas about Simms’ work in and legacy for Dublin city. Through seminars, oral histories and visual representation, the conference will examine Simms’ legacy to the city of Dublin, assess his contribution to the development of communities across Dublin and provide a lens through which to view current contexts.

We are seeking contributions from all to help remember the work of Simms but particularly from:

• Residents of Simms-designed housing
• Architectural historians
• Geographers
• Planners
• Local history groups
• Photographers
• Poets and other artists
• Housing policy workers
• Community workers

Email: simmsdublin@gmail.com

Twitter: @Simms120

Conference committee:

Mary Broe, PhD candidate, Maynooth University

Donal Fallon, Come Here To Me, Historian in Residence Dublin City Council

Erika Hanna, Department of History, University of Bristol

Rhona McCord, Contemporary Irish History, TCD

Eoin O’Mahony, School of Geography, UCD (chair)

Paul Reynolds, Stoneybatter History Group

North Cumberland Street flats, designed by Simms.

The destroyed car of 1916 leader The O’Rahilly. A Dublin urban myth suggested it found its place buried below Hill 16. (Image Credit: National Library of Ireland)

I am a relatively recent convert to Gaelic football, but I’ve been enjoying cold evenings (and the occasional scorcher) in Parnell Park and Croke Park for a while now, thanks to the invitation of friends. Like with League of Ireland football, I’ve found that there is a strong sense of history and identity among Dublin’s support, which of course finds its best expression on the celebrated terrace of Hill 16.

The Hill is central to the way Dubliners see themselves and their city, synonymous with the packed terraces of the Kevin Heffernan days when Gardaí struggled to keep new young GAA fanatics off the pitch, and the chart storming ‘Heffo’s Army’ shouted that “we came marching in from Ringsend, and from Ballyfermot too”, as “Hill 16 has never seen the likes of Heffo’s Army.”

Yet the Hill doesn’t only represent the triumphs of the capital in GAA, it represents the defiance of Easter Week 1916. The Hill, it was often proclaimed, was constructed from the very rubble that the Helga created in her bombardment of the capital. In the 1980s the Irish Examiner proclaimed that it was “no wonder the Dublin football supporters make no bones about claiming possession on big match days”, as “the famous Hill 16 terracing was built from the stones which were all that remained on the capital’s famous street after the conflict of the 1916 Rising.” As Turtle Bunbury notes in his history of Ireland and World War One, “the items reputedly buried beneath the Hill ranged from the bricks of the General Post Office to a De Dion Bouton motorcar belonging to Michael O’Rahilly, one of the Rising’s slain leaders.”

Prior to becoming Hill 16, the terrace was popularly known as Hill 60, the last major assault of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 in World War One. British forces, with many Irishmen in their ranks, endured enormous losses on the so-called Hill 60, located south of Ypres in Belgium, something that was strongly felt in working class Dublin. Though the Royal Dublin Fusiliers did not partake in the battle, the Connaught Rangers endured very significant losses. In a memoir of growing up in north inner-city Dublin almost in the shadow of Croke Park, Brendan Behan remembered the very powerful local significance of the First World War:

When the singing got under way, there’d be old fellows climbing up and down Spion Kop til further orders and other men getting fished out of the Battle of Jutland, and while one old fellow would be telling how the Munster’s kicked the football across the German lines at the Battle of the Somme, there’d be a keening of chorused mourners crying from under their black shawls over poor Jemser or poor Mickser that was lost at the Dardanelles.

The terrace was completed in 1915, in time for that years All Ireland Football Final. The Rising remained an idea in the heads of men like James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada, keen to capitalise on the chaos of the on-going European war. The adopted colloquial name of the terrace was tied on to a very recent moment then, much like Anfield’s Kop was a nod towards the Boer War and the Battle of Spion Kop.

Of course, the terrace witnessed some scenes of drama during the subsequent War of Independence. IRA Intelligence Officer Daniel McDonnell remembered standing on it during the Bloody Sunday massacre in his statement to the Bureau of Military History:

We parked ourselves on the famous Hill 16, and the match had just started when, as far as we could see, there was a rumble and bustle going on around the entrance gate at the Hogan Stand side. I personally had no interest in the match. We suddenly realised that the whole,ground was under rifle and machine-gun fire. We scattered and separated from, one another on the Hill. My hat’ fell off and while I was picking it up the man in front of was shot. I was very fit in those days and I ran across the slob lands’ at the back of Hill 16 over to the Ballybough gate. I ran so fast that I was nearly the first to reach it. The gates were not open. I jumped for the top of the gate, caught it and went over the far side

Given the horror of Bloody Sunday, it sat badly with some that the Hill’s name reflected British military conquest. On the fifteenth anniversary of the Rising, the Chairman of the Munster Council of the GAA reportedly raised his objection that “it was sacred ground, which commemorated their fight for freedom and not a fight in a foreign country.  If they could not call it Hill 16 some more appropriate title should be found for it.” From the 1930s, the name Hill 16 was adopted colloquially, reclaiming the Hill for the green.

Irish Independent, 1931.

Along with the new name, came the myth of the rubble. Paul Rouse brilliantly examines this in his Sport and Ireland: A History, finding evidence from as early as the 1930s of the claim. When Meath made it to the 1939 final, ‘Two Gaels’ writing to a regional newspaper urged the men to victory, reminding them the Hill honoured “Ireland’s fallen heroes, whose blood stains the debris in that immortal Hill.” Rouse also points towards a 1966 claim by one man in a Dublin boozer who claimed to have been paid to transfer rubble to Croke Park. Not for the first time, “history was overwhelmed by the power of men in pubs telling stories.”

The myth of The O’Rahilly’s car being amidst the supposed rubble remained widely believed in Dublin into subsequent decades of the Hill. It has appeared in biographies of O’Rahilly, while as recently as 2003, with the imminent redevelopment of the Hill, it was noted in The Irish Times that:

The recent news that the GAA is to redevelop the historic Hill 16 at Croke Park led us to wonder if the contractors will encounter the remains of an early De Dion car reputedly buried there after the 1916 Rising. The car belonged to The O’Rahilly, one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers.

That the Hill is not created from the rubble of Easter Week does not take away from its magic in any way. Rather, the complex history of its colloquial naming and renaming says much about memory and the meaning of the revolutionary period in Ireland. Republicans sometimes struggled with the continued importance of World War One to many working class Dubliners post-independence. Frank Ryan went as far as to speculate that those who participated in commemorative events around the war were primarily “bank clerks and students of Trinity College”. In truth, there were nowhere near enough bank clerks and Trinity students to fill the space around the Wellington Testimonial in the Phoenix Park or College Green every November 11. Ryan’s astonishing statement ignored the fact that as Brian Hanley has rightly noted, “a section of working class Dublin continued to identify with its contribution during the First World War” in the years that followed independence.

So, what happened to the car?

‘The Man with the Hat’ is not a name Seán Garland chose for himself. A code name bestowed upon him during a CIA investigation, it is an intriguing title for a documentary telling the story of one of the most important and controversial figures of Irish republicanism in the second half of the twentieth century. The Man with the Hat premieres May 15th in Dublin’s Sugar Club, with tickets on sale now from Eventbrite.

A veteran of the Operation Harvest campaign, which saw IRA units attacking British military interests on the north of the Irish border in a campaign directed from Dublin, Seán moved away from traditional republicanism and towards a Marxist perspective in subsequent decades. Republicanism is a broad church of course, and one of those who he had fought alongside in the so-called Border Campaign had been Seán South, an ultra-Catholic nationalist who secured his place in the nationalist pantheon thanks to’ Seán South from Garryowen’.

The funeral of Seán South.

Garland was prominently involved with both the Workers’ Party and the Official IRA,  which declared a ceasefire in May 1972, though the organisation became entangled in increasingly bitter feuds with rival republican organisations in subsequent years, resulting in the deaths of primarily young men on the streets of Belfast and Dublin on all sides, including Charlie Hughes, Seamus Costello and Liam McMillen. The various feuds tore the republican movement apart at moments when unity was badly required.

Garland’s story plays out in Dublin, Belfast, Moscow, Pyongyang and in other surprising places. It is both the story of a secretive parliamentary organisation (which remained active in various ways long after its supposed ceasefire) and a political party which sought Soviet guidance and political power in Ireland. By 1987, an explicitly Marxist party had eight parliamentarians sitting in Dáil Éireann. In 1992, as communism collapsed across Europe, seven of its parliamentarians had abandoned the party and established the social democratic party Democratic Left.

In 2005, a new chapter in Garland’s life began as the United States sought his extradition on the basis of alleged involvement in the distribution of counterfeited US dollars – widely known as “superdollars” – in 1998. American authorities alleged that the source of the banknotes was the government of North Korea.

This upcoming documentary promises to examine all of these issues and more. How a young man from Dublin’s north inner-city can later become entangled in a tale that involves Pyongyang and the U.S legal system is one of the most intriguing stories of twentieth century Ireland, and it is long overdue an airing.

The Irish Times image of Sunstroke, 1994.

Times change, and with it so does public taste. It is certainly fair to say that Irish music festivals in recent years have been dominated by electronic acts and hip hop, which of course is not in and of itself a bad thing. Kendrick Lamar headlines Electric Picnic, Forbidden Fruit sees acts like Four Tet. Those complaining that these festivals are moving away from their so-called roots should note that this has always been the case, with festival line-ups reflecting contemporary charts and tastes. For as long as there have been festivals, there have been people moaning about their line-ups.

In Ireland, the festival came late. The first ever outdoor rock festival in Dublin, and one of the first in Ireland, happened on the hollowed-turf of Richmond Park in 1970, headlined by Mungo Jerry supported by upcomers Thin Lizzy. The thing was a spectacular flop, largely because of scaremongering in the run up to it, especially around drug use.  “I’ve been to better wakes” was a quote from one discontented young punter in The Irish Times, which ran with the headline ‘Open Air Festival Hardly Pops’.  In some ways, and as historian Diarmaid Ferriter has noted, the 1970s were Ireland’s 1960s, and as the decade went on we got better and better at festivals, producing some of the finest in the world for diversity. One could hear a New Wave band like The Atrix and folk giants like Moving Hearts at the same festival in Ireland, proper diversity if ever it existed.

Today, we’re looking at Sunstroke – an incredibly optimistic name for an outdoor festival in Ireland, where pneumonia is generally a greater threat that sunstroke to any paying punter. Running in the early 1990s, it rode the wave of grunge, a real youth culture phenomenon in its day. The festival took place on another League of Ireland pitch, this time Dalymount Park, and had a capacity of 15,000 people. It brought music back to a venue with a prestigious musical history, Dalymount had previously hosted acts like Bob Marley, Thin Lizzy and The Specials.

Sunstroke geared itself towards fans of a heavier sound, young people who were drawn in particular to the distinctive Seattle sound that had become both popular and marketable. It was hard to define just what ‘grunge’ was, The Boston Globe had a go in 1992:

The Seattle-based ‘grunge’ movement is a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture. While nobody can define what grunge is exactly other than a youthful rebellion against pop culture’s slicker aspects, musical, sartorial and otherwise, devotees know it when they see it. And from espresso bars to wool caps, from Alice in Chains on the radio to students in plaid on the streets…the trappings of grunge culture are popping up everywhere.

Every subculture of the twentieth century worried someone of course – before Grunge it was Punk, before Punk it was the Beats, before them the Teddy Boys. Bands from this scene found international success – Nirvana’s Nevermind was a game changer, less commercially successful but equally socially important were Soundgarden’s Superunknown and bands like Mudhoney. A ticket to Sunstroke was £23.75, a very significant sum of dosh in 1993.

To launch a music festival in Ireland in 1993 required a certain confidence. The opposition seemed unshakeable.  Feile in Thurles marketed itself proudly as “Europe’s biggest musical festival”, which some may dispute, but its line-up was absolutely stellar. In 1993 it boasted, to quote one regional paper, “top Australian rockers INXS, former bad boy Iggy Pop, supercool Chris Issak and crusty faves The Levellers.  Also being confirmed are The Shamen, Manic Street Preachers, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Henry rolls, Teenage Fanclub, Squeeze and Paul Brady.”

‘Pogo on a Nazi’ – The fashion of Sunstroke, City Tribune.

Sunstroke’s line up was reflective of the latest trends – Sonic Youth, the Red Hot Chili Peppers…. When RHCP drop out late in the day, they are replaced by Faith No More. There are brilliant images of the stage constructed on the League of Ireland pitch, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The Irish Press reported that “master of ceremonies Dave Fanning kept everything moving swiftly and this open air gig didn’t suffer from the long delays between acts so many others do.”Tony Connolly in the Independent wrote after that it was a sign of something:

It is clear that something phenomenal has been happening in Ireland over the past five years. By the standards of any economic argument a turnover of millions over just ten days in a summer and in predominantly sparsely populated areas is prodigious….It is clear that bands want to come and record here. Ireland is the new Mecca for rock and roll.

Sunstroke returned to Dalyer in 1994, happening on a Thursday which was peculiar in itself, but with a line up that included RHCP and Soundgarden. Just to give a sense how mainstream this kind of music is at that moment in time, some of the best reportage in the run up to the gig came from the regional press all over the country, who reported on how many youths in every corner of the island were expected to converge on Phibsboro. Like in 1993, there was a high profile drop out, this time Soundgarden; Ice Cube stepped into the breach –  leading the Evening Herald to write “there are as many people appalled at his bitter ranting as there are people who claim to be down with Ice.”

It seemed Sunstroke 1994 rocked a little bit too much – The Dalymount Roar – normally reserved for Block G on a Friday night, infuriated local residents. Mountjoy Garda station were quoted in the press the following day as saying “we were getting between 10 and 15 calls a minute protesting  at the noise levels. Some of the calls came from as far away as Coolock, Raheny and Clontarf.” Sunstroke 94 was a massive success, leading the inimitable Jim Carroll to say that “Sunstroke is now a well-established date in the Irish rock calendar. A one-day event without mud, mislaid tent pegs or the danger of an outraged crozier-bearing bishop, it’s got international kudos, bringing some of the best touring acts to Dublin.” There is something magic about images of crowdsurfing long haired young fellas, with the brutalist Phibsboro shopping centre and the battered terrace of Dalymount behind them.

Dalymount Park stage and Phibsboro shopping centre. From the excellent Classic Dublin Gigs Facebook.

Ironically, Sunstroke was probably too good at what it did. They promised rock music, they brought it, and they were in turn driven out of Phibsboro quicker than a man clad in a green and white football scarf. Councillors, even the normally hip and down-with-it Tony Gregory, kicked up a major fuss about the noise, and Sunstroke made its way to the RDS, where it died peacefully in 1995. Soundgarden headlined then, continuing a fine tradition of bands showing up a year after they were meant to.

Evening Herald coverage of Sunstroke 1994.

The Irish music festival is an institution, it will no doubt continue into subsequent decades. New festivals, like All Together Now, should be welcomed, but particular praise should go to the small independent festivals, who embody the spirit of the pioneers of the 1960s and 70s.  The magic of any festival is diversity – in 1980, Seamus Ennis walked out onto the Lisdoonvarna stage and mesmerised long haired youths with the Uileann Pipes, in 1992 Primal Scream stole Chris de Burgh’s star at Feile. Magic moments.

In January 1978, the Dublin Well Woman Centre opened its fifth clinic in the city at 63 Lower Leeson Street under the directorship of Anne Connolly. The aim of the organisation was to help “Irish women access family planning information and services”.

Four right-wing Catholics picketed the opening of the centre with placards reading: “Parents! Contraception means Promiscuity & Abortion” and “No Abortion or Abortion Referral! Defend Our Youth”.

Well Woman Centre picket. Evening Herald, 17 Jan 1978.

The four individuals were Brigid Bermingham, Maureen Fehily, Mine Bean Uí Chroibín/Chribín (Mena Cribben) and John Clerkin.

Well Woman Centre picket. Irish Press, 18 Jan 1978

Bridget Bermingham (or Brigid Bermingham) of 25 Lombard Street West, Dublin 8 was Secretary of Parent Concern in the 1970s/1980s and was also connected to the Concerned Christians’ Group in the early 1980s. She wrote dozens of letters to the newspapers from 1975 until 1986. In November 1977 she handed out leaflets, with Máire Breathnach (Irish Family League) outside a Cherish conference, that stated that there was “no such thing as a single parent” and that the term was invented by the “contraceptives-divorce-abortion-lobby”.

Brigid Bermingham. The Irish Times, 19 Nov 1977.

In June 1980, Bermingham wrote a letter to the Taoiseach Charles Haughey expressing concern about family planning centres and suggesting that they “are no more than prostitution centers (sic) for orgies with … the commercial advocacy of contraceptives and abortion”.

Maureen Fehily, of 2 Leopardstown Avenue, Dublin 18, seems to have been an independent operator. A 1980 letter of hers advocated that Irish children needed a sex education based around the concepts of chastity and moral training and “not assistance in fornication and killing“. She passed away in 1982.

Letter from Mrs. Maureen Fehily to The Irish Times, 06 Mar 1980

Mena Cribben of Santry Avenue, Dublin 9 was a vocal spokesperson for an array of ultra-conservative Catholic groups from the late 1960s until the late 2000s. We covered her political history in a 2012 post on the site. She passed away that same year.

John P. Clerkin of 35 Wellington Road, Crumlin, established the Children’s Protection Society in late 1978. Throughout the 1980s, he rallied against contraception, homosexuality and liberal values.

John P. Clerkin fined. The Irish Times, 27 June 1980.

In 1991, he published a pamphlet entitled ’67 reasons why condoms spread acquired immune deficiency syndrome’.

While they have similar names and have been confused in the past, it would seem that John P. Clerkin is a different individual to Sean Clerkin who ran for the Christian Principles Party in the Cabra ward in the 1991 Dublin City Council Local Election polling 1136 votes (10.4%).

Clerkin mix-up. The Irish Times, 25 July 1991.

Bizarre leaflets from the Children’s Protection Society using the same address and signed by John Clerkin appeared in 2015 and 2017. Further unhinged literature calling on the Irish public to Vote No to retain the 8th amendment also appeared in April 2018 pasted to lampposts and bus-stops. The original John Clerkin, aged 34 in 1980, would be around 72 today so it is quite possible that he or a close relation are behind the most recent circulars.

2018 anti-Repeal material from the Children’s Protection Society. Credit – Irish Election Literature blog