ARE the present-day Dublin street characters as interesting as those of previous generations? There's a real conundrum. Admittedly, one of my favourites was one of the most recent - the Chilean man who squatted by the side of Brown Thomas in Wicklow Street, playing the pan pipes. He was making a genuine contribution to the well-being of everyone in the vicinity, but I haven't seen him for a while. Years ago, Wicklow Street had another resident musician, the woman who played the harp.
Some of the street characters of earlier generations had an expansiveness to their zaniness that made them memorable. It was part of a tradition whose origins date back centuries, no doubt to the very beginnings of the city.
Recently I read a publication of the Old Dublin Society, dated December, 1939, in which one of the articles was devoted to the old Dublin street characters. Many of those mentioned dated back to the 18th century and their names would mean nothing now. But one stuck in my mind: Mary-Anne Night-and-Day. She got her nickname because in the earlier part of the 20th century she walked endlessly in an area bounded by Grafton Street, St Stephen's Green and Harcourt Street. Mary-Anne wasn't a street performer, but because she walked the city streets so constantly, day and night, she became embedded in the public consciousness.
Other "characters" from the 20th century included the Hickey Brothers, who also walked the city streets incessantly. As they walked, they gesticulated flamboyantly as in their heads they rearranged all the buildings round Dublin' s centre, creating an utopian city in their own minds. During the recent boom years, developers took over their function in a more concrete way.
Many readers will remember the woman with the rosary beads who used to dance animatedly on the central plaza in O'Connell Street, in front of the GPO, warning heathen Ireland of the error of its ways. The last time that I saw her, she was enjoying afternoon tea in what was then the Berkeley Court hotel.
Bang-Bang was probably the best-known of all the street characters in the latter part of the 20th century, active from the 1950s onwards. His real name was probably Thomas Dudley (no one is quite sure) and he was addicted to cowboy films. As he roamed the city, he used to do mock shoot-outs on the buses, pretending that his key was a gun. Dubliners often took part in his games by shouting his name at him or, better still, falling down "dead" . On occasion, he even got into theatres and walked across the stage during performances, much to the amusement of audiences. When it came to performance art, Bang-Bang was a true pioneer.
But sadly, like Mary-Anne Night-and-Day before him, and many other street characters, poor Bang-Bang probably suffered from mental illness. He died in 1976.
Another old-time favourite Abraham was Feldman, the son of a Ukrainian who had fled to Dublin in the late 19th century. Abraham, born here in 1901, grew up on Dublin's northside and discovered his life's vocation behind a camera, using a made-up name, Arthur Fields.
Dressed in a long raincoat, regardless of the weather, and sometimes with a scarf for effect, he always wore a battered pork-pie hat at a jaunty angle. His camera was slung around his neck. For the best part of 50 years, until the late 1980s, he was a fixture on O'Connell Bridge and generations of families coming up to Dublin for matches in Croke Park would get their photographs taken by him.
Arthur was a devoted family man, whose three sons and a daughter were brought up on the proceeds of their father's photographic work on
O'Connell Bridge. He died in April, 1994 at the age of 94.
In these days of mobile-phone pictures, there's no place for that old-fashioned, almost instant photography. Similarly, the old- style news boys selling newspapers on the street have also become part of history.
In more recent times, perhaps the most memorable figure was the Diceman, who assumed all kinds of roles, and also, perhaps, marked the point at which old-style characters became superseded by street performers. Born and brought up in Glasgow, Thom McGinty was someone who contributed enormously to the gaiety of his adopted city during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He became so famous that in 1989 he appeared in a production of Oscar Wilde's play Salome at the Gate Theatre. Then there was Pete with his woollen cap who sold copies of In Dublin magazine, in its early years, outside Bewleys in Grafton Street.
In recent years Grafton Street has featured a whole crop of street performers who have often moved on to better things - like Glen Hasard, who left school at 13 and began his career by busking there. Two of my current favourites are the man and the woman who paint themselves from head to toe in gold or silver and become living statues.
They and many others help to keep the tradition of the Dublin street character alive in a technical and impersonal age.