A Heritage Week lecture by artist Pat Liddy in Bewley’s gave a lively insight into the Dublin streets of yore
GRAFTON STREET in 1849 was a “dingy enough place with lots of windows patched with brown paper.”
A century beforehand, it had been a polite, residential street of lesser Georgian houses with a school attended by the likes of Brinsley Sheridan and Thomas Moore in the building that is now Bewley’s.
Today’s Grafton Street, sadly “on the way to somewhere, but [it] doesn’t know where”, has just “a few Victorian buildings, some disgusting modern buildings and one or two Georgian buildings” to show for its time on earth.
The word on the capital’s once wonderful street, and much more besides, was delivered by Pat Liddy in the James Joyce Room in Bewley’s on Tuesday evening.
Liddy – a man who knows a thing or two about Dublin and is as well known for his walking tours of the city as the begging asses of history (though a lot more appreciated) – took a little over an hour to convince that there is nothing new under the sun; not in the history of Dublin or the nation of Ireland anyway.
A free, National Heritage Week event, Liddy’s lecture had enthusiasts queueing for an hour before the doors opened. Not everyone got in, but for those who did, it was a fine way to spend a late summer evening – sitting at tables with plates of scones and single-stemmed pink roses, the air filled with coffee and anticipation as Liddy, his back to the window and the Starbucks sign in the street outside, began by telling us what “a great coffee city” Dublin was in the 18th century.
For all that, it was well into the 19th century before the first ship ever to sail from China to Dublin brought tea to Bewley’s and one Charles Bewley set up shop selling tea in Temple Bar. His wife’s home-made cakes encouraged customers to dawdle and soon the place was a tea house. A legend was born; the Grafton Street Bewley’s dates from 1927 and is Dublin’s oldest existing cafe.
Liddy knows how to tell and sell history, and the evening rolled on into fact and titillation. There was no stopping him and no one wanted to.
He took us back to first base, to an ice-covered Ireland of 10,000 years ago, to the big meltdown and the arrival of “people in boats from France, and the area of Scotland, and from parts of Eastern Europe”. He firmly disabused us of the notion that we’re a neatly homogenous race of Celts, telling us we are in fact “partly French, partly Spanish, partly middle-Eastern”, that we’re even made up of “survivors of the Battle of Troy who set off across the open seas”. This last he acknowledged as a myth, but then gave it legs by telling us how it is taken as fact in Turkey, the site of Troy.
“The Celts arrived about 200-300BC,” said Liddy. “We’re not a Celtic nation – we’re a Celtic-dominated nation.”
He assured us that there were, in fact, better summers in Ireland long ago and, a great man for the topical allusion, told us how climate change 2,500 years ago made it difficult to feed everyone and brought drastic transformation. “We became warlike among outselves,” he said, “developing a civilisation in which dozens of kingships and chieftains fought among themselves”. Heads nodded at this and someone muttered “plus ça change”. Liddy, with lightening speed, continued through the centuries.
The Celts, he said, “kept things stitched together with their roads” but we were nevertheless anything but a united people when the Vikings, “supreme masters of import/export business”, arrived in the early 9th century. Here, on a personal note, I learned that that my antecedents were the Dubh Ghall (hence Doyle), a shower of “black-haired scumbags from Denmark who didn’t go home”. Ah, me.
We revisited Diarmuid McMurrough’s treachery and Henry II’s arrival, the growth of Dublin’s importance, a 12th-century picnic in Ranelagh, the decimation of the 1347 plague and a Cromwell who was “ruthless and bloody and successful, much like the Irish though they weren’t so successful.
"He subdued Ireland, made it a colony and carried out the first mapping of the country." Tales of Handel and the Messiahin the 18th century provided lighter moments.
Tales of the city’s first developer, Sir Humphrey Jervis, and of the Earl of Drogheda provided salutory ones, reminding us of the once supreme elegance of Henrietta Street and how developers building around the mansion that was Leinster House quickly killed off views of the sea, and worse.
It took just a little over an hour to bring us back to Grafton Street, always and ever “a microcosm of Dublin”, its slight curve following the River Stein that flows underneath and joins the Liffey at Hawkins Street.
