Song Snatcher

 Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Performing for Amnesty International - Yes, that is Adrian Mitchell on the left.....

Last night I had a dream.  Somehow, I was to sing a song.  I think it was at an event at my wife, Amanda’s, Care Home, so there would be a small audience – maybe some twenty or thirty.  My son-in-law has recently loaned me his Martin acoustic guitar, though I have not practised for years.  

Thanks, Cam - I'll look after it

 

In the dream I had the guitar, and I had several books of words and chords.  These were the books that I had written out when a teenager (I had my first, cheap, guitar, when I was about twelve).  I can see them now, flimsy exercise books with my handwriting in royal blue ink underlined on the cover, then songs written out with the chords over the words in red biro.

 

Some of the first songs I learned were simple American songs, cowboy songs, copied from Alan Lomax’s American Songbook, and probably heard on Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio on Sundays.  

 

Then there was Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan with some more modern material – Blowin’ in the Wind, etc.  

 

My guitar playing was simplicity itself – three chords if I was lucky, and none of them with a barré (so B minor was a problem) and my sense of rhythm less than strict. I was no singer, either, though perhaps later on my voice pleased some.

 

Anyway, I was there with the guitar and my song books, but then, as I seemed to be on a stage now, with a gathering audience, I panicked a bit.  I couldn’t find the books, I had put them somewhere but I was now lost.  I was never good at remembering all the words, and, I had had a crib stuck on the shoulder of my guitar with the first words of lines or verses to help me.

 

But I get ahead of myself.

 

For many years I just played a bit with friends.  I was a very minor part of a group led by school mate ‘Niggles,’ with Nick on Bass, Ben as vocalist, and Roy Dodds (yes, THE Roy Dodds) on drums.  I remember we played at parties, but my contribution was minimal.  I don’t think anyone noticed.

 

Picture taken on Dunrobin Beach, Sutherland, for the local press

I made some progress however when another friend, Charlie Snoxall, gave me a better guitar, and it was with this that I went to Scotland before my eighteenth birthday.  There I met Paul and Derek and we formed The Dunrobiners (for more about this period you can see an earlier Blog, entitled “Highlands,” https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2014/06/highlands.html) quickly becoming sought after for Ceilidhs and pubs, and even making a record (long since disappeared, don’t even try to find it....)  I remember one evening when we drove up to Wick in Paul’s Rover 90 to perform at a folk club.  The headline act was Hamish Imlach (I think!) and we played with him – but that’s about all I recall..... 

Paul, Derek and me at The Stag's Head, Golspie in 1969
I loved that silk shirt (until I dropped hot cigarette ash on it!)

 

Later that summer we did a week in the front room of The Stag’s Head, Golspie, and I still smell the tables of Tennent’s Heavy that accumulated before us as we worked through our repertoire of traditional Scottish and Irish songs, including The Irish Rover (She had twenty-three masts and she stood several blasts....), Leaving of Liverpool (So fare thee well my own true love....), and my speciality, The Black Velvet Band (Her eyes they shone like diamonds/You’d think her the queen of the land/And her hair it hung over her shoulder/Tied up with a black velvet band), the whole room joining in for the chorus. Apart from that I spent time trying to impress the Assistant Matron (the gorgeous Marty Dearlove) by plucking my way through The Last Thing on my Mind, my eyes sticking to her like snails on a window pane, while she darned the boarders’ socks (Are you going away with no word of farewell/Will there be not a trace left behind?) 

 

Not a trace.....

 

Around the same time, I also spent holidays in Ireland and met Luke Kelly, in Dublin (for more on this see my Dublin 3 Blog https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/10/dublin-3_28.html).  I learned a little from singers and guitarists, but, to be honest, I wasn’t a very good musician.  I had a few party pieces – Season of the Witch (When I look out my window), being one, Mr Tambourine Man (Let me forget about today until tomorrow.....) another.

 

Several years later, in Rome, friends formed Roisin Dubh, the Celtic connection being strong at the time, and I bought a new (Echo) guitar, which stayed in tune a little better than my old one.  With a friend and colleague, Gerry, I set up a folk group at our school, and we practised and sang loud and happily for some years.  It was, interestingly, a very cosmopolitan group, including Palestinians and Israelis as well as British and Italians, and we performed at concerts that I set up for Amnesty International, headlined by the likes of Adrian Mitchell and Roger McGough, with songs like I shall be released (They say ev’rything can be replaced....)

One iteration of our folk group in Rome

 

On my return to the UK I tried to keep going, but family life and then, eventually, my wife’s illness withered the vine.

 

And so, to my dream.  I am now searching furiously for my word books, sweating and frightened, the enormous audience restless (we are in something like the Ryman Auditorium now), but I am lost, and my soft fingers are not practised.

 

I stand and there is a hush.  I decide to talk about memory, and memory loss, and try to illustrate this with snatches from some of the songs I used to sing, plucking hopefully at the guitar.  At my door the leaves are falling/The cold wild wind will come/Sweethearts walk by together/And I still miss someone..... (Johnny Cash).  I struggle to complete the song, and then talk some more about my personal history as I have told you, dressing up my encounters with musicians and singers, grasping at memories of lines.  Things begin to fall into place, I see my light come shining/from the west unto the east/Any day now, any day now/I shall be released....

Danny, Andrew and Clive

 

My confidence grows, my fingertips harden, I use a pick, Must be the season of the witch!  I talk a bit about dementia, about the way my wife has lost all language, I strum a chord, and begin Love minus zero: (My love, she speaks like silence....) I falter.....  I begin Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, but muddle the verses:  Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why babe, If’n you don’t know by now.....

 

The audience is standing, No wait!  I say.  I just remembered.  One more.....

 

May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true,

May you always do for others and let others do for you,

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung,

May you stay for ever young

For ever young, for ever young, May you stay forever young.....

 

The auditorium is dark and empty.  The audience has gone.  The auditorium has gone.  I am in my wife’s Care Home, in the Dining Room; Amanda is asleep, head down on the table.  The cook brings me a cup of tea.  Very nice, she says.  You should go on Britain’s got talent......

 

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

 

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

 

Bob Dylan

 

Dublin 3

Dubliners

I was spellbound.  His head was tilted back like a sword swallower’s, and from his throat issued the sound of steel, a blade of pure sound, not sharp, perhaps, nor shiny, but fashioned and worn and used and honed and hefted and crafted and wielded and powerful and strong.  His hair, curls and frizzes of coppery coils, shook back down his neck, darker against the thin shine of the spotlight.

In the gutted Georgian building on Lower Mount Street, then “The Ould Triangle” folk club, Luke Kelly was cold fire. No one stirred.  His voice cut the dark, retelling ballads as if they were personal.  In the pauses I could hear my Sweet Afton burning, the crisp crackle of tobacco and paper like a bonfire.  “Oh, come all ye Tramps and Hawkers…..” “ Joe Hill”  and “On Raglan Road…..” [“And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day”] and songs I had never heard before, and have not heard since.  He had a great repertoire of folk song, partly following several years in the early sixties in Newcastle, Leeds and Birmingham, and some time with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in London.  Many of the songs Luke sang dealt with social issues, and his passionate left-wing position was uncharacteristic of the time.

The club was celebrating its second birthday; it was Wednesday, August 16^th, 1967 and I was with friends because Jim Trayner, who I’d met in Kinsale, was playing there.  I was introduced to Luke in what might have been the kitchen.  It was late, and the pubs had closed, but pints were still flowing in the club.  He was charm itself, and in no hurry to turn away.  We talked of the Dubliners and their coming tour of the UK, and, with Gerry O’Grady, of Irish music, banjoes and song.  It was 3.30am when we got back to Deirdre’s house and Jim and I sat up until dawn, alight with the spirit of the occasion.

After a night in Phoenix Park, the jumper the colour of "buff coloured puke"

The trip to Kinsale had been accidental; when hitch hiking you accept lifts and advice ad hoc, and having taken the 7.00am ferry from Fishguard to Rosslare, I had exhausted any concrete plans, so when a kind driver recommended the Folk House in Kinsale, that’s where I ended up.  And from there I found myself in company and next thing was I was camping out in the vast ruins of Charles’ Fort, which once dominated the approach to Kinsale harbour. 

Jim Trayner was a housepainter by trade, but a singer and guitarist by inclination.  On the battlements over the sea he taught me to play Tom Paxton’s “Last thing on my mind,” one of the few songs I still know by heart.  Also there was Joanna O’Dwyer, a Dublin girl with skin like the collar on a pint of stout and hair the colour of butter.  Jo had been taught at school by Ronnie Drew, and told me, I think, that he had been an interpreter for David Lean on location for “Lawrence of Arabia” and had nearly caused a riot by insulting the Arabs.  This may be true, but it would be more likely that Ronnie was in Spain when David Lean shot “Dr Zhivago.”  Anyway, I was taken by her light smile and lively chatter and when we went separate ways I was drawn inexorably back to Dublin, as Bantry, Limerick, Cavan drizzled by in the grey.

I kept a (admittedly sketchy) diary of the trip, and what amazes me now is the ease with which we moved about the city, from Dun Laoghaire (where I stayed with Deirdre and her brother Paddy while their parents were away) to the centre, to the O’Dwyer’s house where mother was untrusting, suspecting me to be much older (insisting on Jo’s little brother being chaperon) to the National and Municipal Art Galleries, to St Stephen’s Green to hang out, to the Guinness Brewery at St James’ Gate, to one of the many Forte’s restaurants on O’Connell Street, to O'Donoghue's in Merrion Row, and so on, and so on.

And people were so friendly, so hospitable.  In my diary I wrote: “Mr and Mrs McMahon v nice people.”  They were indeed, as Paul had taken me back home one night, and his mother fed me and prepared my bed for the night; in the morning, after a full Irish breakfast, his father gave us a lift into town.

And the party we had at Deirdre’s was mad.  Paul turned up with a six pint kettle full of Guinness, and Jim came from a recording studio with a jacket full of miniature bottles of whiskey.  Guitars and songs provided the entertainment.  It was grand.

I saw Joanna once more after that.  By some chance, three years later, we both happened to be at the Spaniard in Old Kinsale.  She was travelling with a boyfriend and on her way, she thought, to the continent.  I was heading to Mayo and my cousins in Westport. So, like ships in the night?  Anyway, a few days later, totally against all plans, our paths crossed once more in the flurry of Grafton Street in Dublin. A chat, a drink, a flash of a smile.  And then nothing.  Less ships in the night; more the Lusitania and a torpedo.  She had had a murmur on her heart:  I wonder does it murmur yet?

The Quays, 1970/71, where Phil Lynott got the look

And I never saw Luke Kelly in person again.  The Dubliners toured the world, but Luke collapsed in 1980 with a brain tumour, which finally silenced him in 1984.  He was 44.  Since then the other original Dubliners have died; Ciarán Bourke in 1988, Ronnie Drew in 2008, and Barney MacKenna on April 5^th 2012.  There are still plenty of people in Dublin, but they are not all Dubliners as of yore.

Christy Moore recorded a tribute to Luke Kelly written by Michael O’Caoimh, which refers to the “power and passion” of his voice, soaring heavenly above.  It ends:

“For memories are all we have

When we think of you today

Your name we’ll always honour, Luke

We’re glad you passed this way.”

Amen to that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DCtYXQEYoc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19qdV2vgM-o&feature=player_embedded#!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz_dHcduUTU&feature=fvwrel



Dublin 2

The Literate Liffey

It’s funny how the past slips through your fingers.  Just when you think you are at the moment, it’s gone.  Only the other day I was in Neary’s writing something (or other) when who didn’t buy me a drink?  Well it wasn’t Brian O’Nolan, 101 years old and still assuming the name of Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da).  Oh, the number of times we haven’t spoken!  Incipit Crusculum Lan!

Well it was his round.  I would have bought him one in Peter’s Pub (sadly since much changed), another of his haunts, when I was first exploring Dublin bars in 1967, but he didn’t turn up.  And the excuse?  He’d died the year before?  How often have we heard that one?  And I had just spent the night on a concrete slab outside the public toilets in Phoenix Park.  And yes, the jumper I wore did bear a strong resemblance to “buff-coloured puke.”

So it was in 1971, on one of my many happy returns, that I purchased a copy of the Irish Times which I still have today, yellowed and creased into the folds of my copy of “The Best of Myles.”  It still seems only the other day.  Time plays those tricks.

I was, in those years, enamoured of Irish Literature, and felt that the Quays on the Liffey could open the doors to enlightenment.  “The Book of Kells,” one page turned a day, was a must to see in the Old Library of Trinity College.  “Ulysses” was a must read (and the Bailey in Duke Street a must see, as they held the front door of Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street there – though now it’s at the James Joyce Centre and the Bailey has been transformed) and the Martello Tower at Sandycove a must visit (though the Forty Foot was actually a must avoid…..)

I took Joyce’s conundrum to cross Dublin without passing a pub at its literal value, and never passed a pub.  McDaids still echoed to the laughter of the Borstal Boy, even though he died in ‘64.  Fluther Good was playing cards in “The Plough and the Stars” (“Keep a sup for to-morrow?  How th’ hell does a fella know there’ll be any to-morrow?”)  Brian Friel’s “Lovers” were playing at the Gate Theatre – I know; I saw them (August 21^st 1967) – and Siobhán McKenna was Juno (at the Gaiety in ’66 and at the Abbey in ’80), with the whole worl’ around her in “a terrible state o’ chassis.”

I even ventured into the Celtic Twilight, romancing in Stephen’s Green and Phoenix Park, sighing at the Wild Swans at Coole, (“Their hearts have not grown old,…..”) visiting Thoor Ballylee, climbing the winding stair, seeking the stare’s nest.  Later I attempted to pay my own tribute by directing Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World,” but fear it was inadequate, especially when the second performance ran fifteen minutes shorter than the first – perhaps subconsciously trying to recreate it’s first ever staging, when it met with serious disapproval?

There was an atmosphere then, however, that has since passed away.  The Quays were dilapidated, with at least one shop window itself a chronicle of times past, and the General Post Office pillars bore the scars of the Easter Rising (as they still do in fact).  Street markets were untidy, scrappy affairs, and one pub I knew was illuminated by a single, bare light bulb dangling over the bar.

Somehow, however, in a tenuous but real way, I felt connected.  A friend (admittedly an old one) had once spent a night in jail with Maud Gonne MacBride, and also offered to introduce me to Micheál Mac Liammóir (I passed on that one).  Whether it was a coffee in Bewley’s or a glass of stout in Kehoe’s, there was a literacy in the dark air, with words spinning webs through the smoke. And through the city centre was the Liffey, the river of life, an Life, Anna Livia Plurabelle, inspiring bridges to carry the names of heroes.  And behind the Georgian façades, “that old triangle/Went jingle jangle/Along the banks of the Royal Canal.”

Dublin was famous for its exiles, and not just the old guard of Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and followers; it was a hard place to make headway.  The puritanical past was still there, and the church, and poverty, still ruled.  I was refused service in a lounge bar in Dun Laoghaire because I was attempting to buy my friend Joanna a drink; it wasn’t because I was only sixteen, it was because women were not served.  On another day, Deirdre scandalised the neighbourhood for going to Mass in her bare feet. 

Brian Friel, quoted in “A Paler Shade of Green” in 1972, said that he was, “uneasy about the future of the writer in Ireland.  Ireland is becoming a shabby imitation of a third-rate American state…..  We are rapidly losing our identity as a people and because of this that special quality an Irish writer should have will be lost.  A writer is the voice of his people and if the people are no longer individuals I cannot see that the writer will have much currency.”  I am sure that there will be plenty who do not take this view, but a change was certainly happening.

In 1966 Nelson’s pillar at the bottom of O’Connell Street, was blown up.  Such was the pride in this that at least four pubs subsequently claimed to have Nelson’s head in their back parlour.  Also in the 1960s, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, Patrick Kavanagh, and Flann O’Brien moved on. For them I quote from the archives of the Myles na gCopaleen Catechism of Cliché (“a unique compendium of all that is nauseating in contemporary writing”):

“And of what nature is their loss?

Well-nigh irreparable.”

Oh dere.  Ah hoy!  The past begins to slip away again.  In Davy Byrnes, musing on opportunities lost, and found, I savour a ball of malt.  I am struck by two men at the bar, East Europeans perhaps, who by the tilt of their hats and the laces of their boots might be characteristic of the changes in Dublin society today.  They lean in silence; a long silence.  Then one of them says:

“That passed the time.”

And the other replies:  “It would have passed in any case.”

To which his friend responds: “Yes, but not so rapidly.”

           

Pause

Dublin 1

WHEREVER GREEN IS WORN

This piece was written quite a few years ago - at least ten - following a stay in Dublin at Gino and his Dublin born wife Mary's home in Dalkey. In those distant days the Celtic Tiger was barely a cub - now it is just a skin on a waiting room floor. In those days Bono had just bought the end house of a row on Sorrento point, reputedly for several million euros; now his money is said to be on the continent.... Anyway, although some of the personnel at "Il Baccaro" may have since changed, Gino still commutes between Rome and Dublin and "Il Baccaro" still thrives, even being said by one reviewer to be the only Italian restaurant in Ireland! And Kilmainham Jail, the history of Ireland, and Dublin's fair city are all still there and ever will be. In fact, since the excesses of the Stag Party days, Dublin has settled down into married life, and it is possible to wander the streets without being oppressed by people desperately having a wonderful time, as if marriage opened the gates of hell and it was a duty to exceed all bounds before entering. So, if you'll forgive the odd metachronism......

The Panopticon, Kilmainham Jail

Kilmainham Jail symbolises much of the darker side of Irish history. In harder times than these there was a queue of people committing crimes to gain imprisonment. In recent times, films, such as “In the Name of the Father” have been made on location inside the Victorian East Wing, recreating in two dimensions the claustrophobia of some of the country’s past and simultaneously glamorising it and creating the romance of stardom. In some ways, it makes a stage set of the past, “unless, soul clap its hands and sing,” that recreation helps us build a better world to come. 

To stand in the rock breakers’ yard, hemmed in by high stone walls, on the spot where in early May 1916 fourteen leaders of the Easter Rising - Pearse, MacDonagh, Plunkett, MacBride and fellows - faced the firing squad, and to imagine those bullets smacking into flesh and bone is to take a serious view of Ireland yet, perhaps, such imaginings may be a trifle melancholy in the general scheme of things. For Ireland, or at least Dublin has come a long way since then. Kilmainham Jail represents something deep in the Irish soul and the men who died there in 1916, let alone the hundred thousand or so who passed through there in its 128 years of active service, stood for belief in political freedom and died for the rights of others. Their revolution may have failed at the time, but Ireland has flourished because of their determination and spirit.

Sorrento Point with Dalkey Island behind

There’s no looking back. Dublin has changed. There are few scars left from the bad times, the revolution or the civil war. There are few undeveloped plots, few derelict Georgian houses, and few bars where James Joyce or Myles or Brendan would feel at home. John Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street (established 1782) prides itself on its authenticity, but the towering modern buildings around it are not conducive to imaginative recreations of a Joycean night out. John Kehoe’s, at 9, South Anne Street (until recently the last of the resident owned pubs in the city centre) allows drinkers to occupy the family lounge upstairs, and the wooden partitions downstairs allow private conversations to remain private despite the throngs of young patrons who have replaced the seriously dark suited men of yesteryear. The craic is good, if you can hear it! Even the National Gallery of Ireland, home of the masterworks of Jack Yeats, has a brand new “Millennium Wing”, which, with its collection of modern and contemporary Irish Art, was opened this year.

 

John Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street, not much changed since its appearance in "Ulysses"

Dublin is now truly cosmopolitan, and the tiny area known as Temple Bar has become an international byword for a good time. In terms of places to be it is in the same league as Amsterdam, Greenwich Village, the Parisian Left Bank, Prague and the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Weekend flights from the UK are full of bright young things heading for the bars and restaurants in the warren of streets just off the south side of the Liffey, across the Ha’penny Bridge and through the Merchant’s Arch. Almost bulldozed into a new bus terminal in the 1980s, Temple Bar was saved from one kind of oblivion and, partly thanks to Charles Haughey and his social conscience, the place suddenly took off in the 1990s, with such institutions as the Irish Film Centre, the Arthouse (the centre for the Artists’ Association of Ireland) and the Temple Bar Music Centre, being created in state of the art reconstructions. In Meeting House Square a whole-food market attracts attention in the daytime and open-air film screenings, concerts or theatre productions draw the crowds at night. Although the area has something of a reputation for excess, especially in connection with stag and hen parties from the UK, there is a convivial good humour to the evening jostle. Street performers entertain the passers-by while innumerable bars attempt to satisfy their thirsts.



The Ha'penny Bridge over the Liffey

And tucked into a corner of Meeting House Square, in what was until five years ago a disused and dingy eighteenth century cellar, there is “Il Baccaro”, one of the most natural Italian Restaurants you will find outside of Italy. The name derives from Venetian wine shops, where it is customary to stand with a group of friends eating appetising snacks while drinking local wine, and its inspiration also comes from the Roman Osterie, traditionally simple in their fare. The mastermind behind this venture is Gino Bottigliero, an Italian originally from Naples, whose long greying hair, drooping moustaches and dark flashing eyes give him a piratical air. Gino met and married Mary Pyne, a Dublin girl from the top of O’Connell Street, and, while living in Rome, had the bright idea of opening an Irish pub in the Italian capital. That was in 1976, since when Irish theme bars have become almost de rigeur in every neck of the woods in Italy, and The Fiddler’s Elbow in via dell’Olmata is just one of Gino’s series of very successful bars in Rome and Florence, and now Dublin.



Gino, Lorenzo and Sofia

Gino’s success comes partly from a no-nonsense approach to business, where he recognises the need for efficiency and quality, but also derives from a fertile imagination and the ability to create a friendly ambience. His partner, Dubliner Tiernan Maguire, spent several years working with Gino in Rome, and he shares that warmth of personality that is engendered by a blend of cultures. “Il Baccaro” looks just as you would expect an Italian place to look, with posters of Sophia Loren rubbing shoulders with photographs of Gino’s own grandparents on the walls. It is ever so slightly kitsch, and also retro as symbolised by the poster for “La Dolce Vita” but somehow that does not seem out of place in Temple Bar, and it is evidently utterly acceptable to the diners who pack it out every night. The low brick arches and wooden furniture make a cosy environment and the Italian staff, including Claudia and Manuela alternating behind the bar and Marina waiting, are expert in welcoming and dealing patiently with customers.

Lorenzo, the chef, from Rovigo, is a highly qualified and creative cook. Among his specialities is “rotolo di crepe con ricotta alle erbe e vegetali,” which is a combination of cream cheese and vegetables cooked in a thin pasta roll. He also delivers an unusual risotto made with pears and Gorgonzola, and a tasty “caponata di melanzane,” a Sicilian aubergine stew. Gino contributes to the ideas, as well, and he found a butcher in Dun Laoghaire capable of recreating traditional Italian “porchetta romana”, which is pork stuffed with herbs and spices and cooked slowly in a huge oven. There is also an interesting pasta dish called “penne all’arrabbiaciana”, which is an imaginative combination of the fiery “arrabbiata” sauce with chilli pepper and the bacon flavoured “amatriciana” sauce from the town of Amatrice in the Abruzzi Mountains. If you can manage a dessert, the home-made “tiramisu” is excellent and then, in true Italian style, an evening can be rounded off with Vin Santo and cantuccini or amaretti, traditional biscuits that are just right with sweet wine.

Temple Bar and Kilmainham Jail may not have too much in common, nor do, superficially at least, the Irish with the Italians, but there are connections in the spider’s web of culture and history that hold them together. The origin of Celtic culture actually lies in the Po Valley of Northern Italy, from whence the Celts moved north and west, through France and Brittany to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The Roman Catholic Church, once universal, now less so in Europe at least, is a linking strength between Eire and Italy. The excesses of Temple Bar and the austerities of Kilmainham Jail are two sides of the same coin; without one, you won’t have the other. Like sin and repentance, or joy and sorrow, they are the faces of Ireland. In my visit to Kilmainham I was accompanied by Gino, and though neither of us was born or brought up in Ireland, we both have long-standing ties to the country and deep sympathies with it; we were both impressed and moved by the experience. The prison has iconic and metaphorical value. We are just passers-by, but we are also a part of the fabric. The economy may thrive, but not in a vacuum. The history is remembered, but not by chance.

The last prisoner to walk free from Kilmainham Jail, was.....

The last prisoner to walk free from Kilmainham Jail was Eamon de Valera, who vacated his cell in 1924. Later in his life he became Prime Minister and then President of the Republic of Ireland. The Ireland he helped to create is a land of opportunity, and a land that welcomes an Italian Osteria in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” Like a soup made from leeks and potatoes, food can be universal or particular. Call it “zuppa di porri e patate” and serve it with a little olive oil and a good glass of fresh Pinot Grigio and it will seem ever so Italian. Even in Dublin. It may not be quite what the youth of Europe flock to Temple Bar for, but it will do me fine. As William Butler Yeats also said, as well as the above quotation, “I have prepared my peace with learned Italian things.”

Il Baccaro

Meeting House Square

Dublin

Telephone: 671 4597

http://www.ilbaccarodublin.com/