Dublin's profound impression on a returning emigrant

I grew up in and around Dublin in the seventies and the city as it was then is ingrained in me.

I moved to California in the eighties but have been back on and off many times. And yet this latest trip left a more profound impression on me than I could ever have predicted.

It was a last-minute decision to tack on a week of meetings in Dublin to a long-planned vacation in France. I had recently uploaded a new book to Amazon and wanted to meet face-to-face with some old friends and quiz them about my controversial memoir.

The visit got off to a disastrous start as I had left my iPhone in the taxi in Paris on the way to the airport. Moreover, the chip on my debit card had failed and I was about to find out that most Irish businesses had abandoned the ancient card readers where you actually swiped your card. I had barely enough cash to get myself checked into the Wellington in Temple Bar and buy a burner phone on Westmoreland Street, half expecting to be arrested by the drug squad when I walked out of the shop.

I got my Mac going on the hotel wifi and apprised my family back stateside of my predicament. We activated the lost iPhone software and there was my phone traversing Paris.

I had a day to spare before my first meeting, so I pub-crawled around Temple Bar furious at myself for my own stupidity. I soon realized that you might as well stick with one singing pub or the other because they all have the same playlist and there are only so many times you can listen to 'first producing your rapier,' 'jumping through the ring of fire,' or shagging your love 'against the gas works wall.'

And then a miracle happened. I had plugged in my Mac at The Norseman and an e-mail popped up in French. It was the taxi driver in Paris. He didn’t speak a lick of English but my French was good enough to go back and forth with him. If I sent him €150 by PayPal he would drive the phone to Beauvais Airport (again) and give it to a Dublin-bound Ryanair passenger.

The next morning, I jumped on a Dart train to Malahide where I met that good passenger and gave him a copy of my book in exchange for my precious phone. Where else in the world could you make that happen?

Back now in the land of the living, I got off at Tara Street station and walked to my first meeting in Buswells Hotel on Kildare Street, a sumptuously decorated venue befitting my old friend and now successful management consultant, John Geehan.

He had not read "Out Of Step" yet (my memoir) and was only vaguely aware of its contents. His opinion in the coming days would be one of several litmus tests that I eagerly awaited.

The following day, I traipsed across Dame Street, along Wicklow Street, halfway up Grafton Street, and tacked down Duke Street to Davy Byrnes for lunch with someone who had indeed read "Out Of Step," an old classmate from secondary school in Naas, Joe Buckley, who I had not seen since we were teenagers though we had long since connected on Facebook as he too had written a novel, an incredible coincidence. Joe was now a retired eurocrat who had been inspired by a stint in Hong Kong to write a thriller around the end of British colonial rule.

Excellent food and service washed down with who knows how many pints of Guinness and we got all caught up on kids, careers, and even the odd grandkid. Joe loved the book, calling it an emotional roller coaster that he had binge-read in one sitting.

The Wellington was full that night, so I hauled my backpack and roller bag along Aston Quay, across O’Connell Bridge, much wider than I remembered it, up the length of O’Connell Street, then on past Parnell Square and east on Denmark Street to Gardiner House, a guest house nestled into the Georgian facades. Now I was on the North Side of the Liffey in the midst of a truly multi-racial, multi-lingual immigrant population.

I bought take-out at The Turkish Kebab House on Parnell Street, a hole-in-the-wall joint catering to an overflowing crowd speaking in tongues I couldn’t place. I ducked into Murray’s Bar for more music to discover that the back of this bustling tavern gave onto what was surely an acre or more of beer garden.

Some things never change though and the next day, when I met Paul Fenton in Kehoes on Anne Street, we might as well have been back in UCD Engineering in the seventies. While the hostelries in Temple Bar all served €20 plates of food, this was a haunt purely for the consumption of draught stout, possibly with a whiskey chaser. The decor was the very same, if not darker, as was the case for McDaid’s across the street though when we walked along Stephen’s Green to O’Donoghue’s for old time’s sake that had expanded into the alleyways behind.

I would have several more days of meetings in the city and some that required a bus or tram but they would only further reinforce my impressions thus far.

Dublin, for all the meteoric economic growth and its new globally cosmopolitan population that had not existed a half-century earlier when it was my home, was still the same. It was, I knew now, having traveled the world and seen all the other urban candidates, the world’s greatest walking city. It always had been but we just didn’t know it.

Dublin is of course a literary cornucopia and no book better describes, and indeed defines, it than James Joyce’s "Ulysses." The streets and alleys and bridges and parks where Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom once trod are all still here. Was Joyce prescient? Did he know that this would be Dublin’s legacy? Or did all of us who lived and loved in this place absorb his vision and unconsciously fulfill it for today and for generations still to come?

*You can contact Seán Kenny at seankennyauthor@gmail.com. You can find his memoir "Out Of Step - Memoir Of A Life Misled" on Amazon.

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