Cónaitheach

The Picture of Dublin for 1811, being a description of the city, and a correct guide to all the public establishments, curiosities, amusements, exhibitions, and remarkable objects, in and near the city of Dublin. With a map of Dublin in the year 1610; a large map for 1811, and several views. On the same principle as The Picture of London.Dublin, printed for the proprietor, by J. and J. Carrick, Batchelor’s Walk; and sold at 41, Golden Lane; La Grange, Nassau Street; Gilbert and Hodges, and Dugdale, Dame Street; and all the booksellers. (Price six shillings British).This is the first edition of The Picture of Dublin, published in 1811. It does not name an editor or compiler, but the imprint states that it was printed for the proprietor, and sold at 41 Golden Lane. At this time 41 Golden Lane was the address of J. and W. Gregory, printers and booksellers. The dedication to the third edition, published in 1816, is signed by William Gregory, so he is likely to have been the compiler of the first edition.It was based on a similar guide to London, and it was aimed at visitors to the city. It went into several editions in the first half of the 19th century, with many different editors, see Dublin City’s online catalogue for other editions.Like a modern guide book this guide starts with a short history of Dublin, followed by a contemporary description of the city and its inhabitants. It describes the public buildings and other sites worth visiting and it is illustrated with engraved plates showing the Bank of Ireland, College Green, the newly built Custom House, Nelson’s Pillar, and the Grand Canal at Portobello Harbour. Nitty-gritty details for the visitor are also included: lists of hotels, stage coaches, public baths, banks, newspapers, etc. An index makes the guide user friendly for the tourist.One of the earliest maps of the city is that of John Speed, published in 1610, which is reproduced at the front of this volume. The map formed part of The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, published in London in 1610. This gives an idea of the historical shape of the city. The modern map of 1811, folding into the back of the guide, shows the plan of the streets with the main sites marked.This guide allows the historical tourist to wander the streets of Dublin, admiring the many buildings, parks and statues, and experiencing the exhilaration of visiting a distant place: distant in time rather then space. Alternatively download The Picture of Dublin (PDF, 4.48MB) using Adobe Acrobat. Cannot access PDF?View images from The Picture of Dublin for 1811 on flickr

Early modern Dublin was a massive time of growth from Dublin as it transformed from a small medieval city to the modern city we recognise today. In this lecture, 'Dublin's civic buildings in the early modern period' Professor Colm Lennon takes us on a journey through the city, highlighting the key buildings, many of which have become landmark features of Dublin.

When the Vikings founded the city in the ninth century in the area of the “black pool” (Dubh Linn in Irish) where Dublin Castle is today, they started what would later become the capital of Ireland and the largest city in the country. Dublin is a key to understanding Ireland; the history of this city helps us to better understand the history of the whole of the country, its development, its cultural features, its social composition and the political peculiarities in Ireland.

The following political cartoons come from the United Ireland and the Weekly Freeman and the National Press, Irish nationalist newspapers that commented on the last few decades of nineteenth-century Ireland. These cartoons illustrate Irish nationalist sentiments at the time by commenting on political events and figures, in particular the Home Rule Movement, the Land War, and the 1892 General Election.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Dr Roisín Higgins on the rich history of Dublin's sporting grounds, pitches and clubs and the stories they tell about the social, economic and political life of city and its people. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010. Listen to the lectureWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'Where Dubliners have played', Dr Roisín Higgins relates the rich history of Dublin's sporting grounds, pitches and clubs and what they tell us about the social, economic and political life of city and its people.  Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 11 September 2010, as part of the Sport and the City Seminar.Thanks very much for the invitation to speak. As Aideen said I work on the Irish Sporting Heritage Project so I’m always interested in information on particularly grounds. It’s the built heritage that I’m interested in but those grounds contain stories and histories so it’s always great for me to be able to speak to different groups of people who will have experience. It’s right across the country but actually I haven’t done enough work on Dublin yet so any information that comes in I’d be very grateful for.The most striking new building on the Dublin skyline is of course the Aviva stadium. I’ve been told by people who have done - is it called the Dublin Eye or the wheel? – that when you look down it’s just magnificent this new stadium. As Lansdowne Road, it was the oldest rugby ground in Europe, and first hosted athletics in 1872. The original stadium was a multi-sports venue, which included a cinder track for athletics, cricket pitch, croquet green, three football pitches and facilities for archery and lawn tennis. I’ve no photos of that or sketches of that; I’d love to see what it looked like as a multi-sports venue at that time. But now that site on Lansdowne Road has been transformed into a remarkable piece of twenty-first century architecture. The Sunday Tribune last week noted that for the cost of saving Anglo-Irish Bank the country could have built twenty-five state-of-the-art hospitals, or twenty Aviva Stadiums. It’s more expensive than a hospital; €410 million the Aviva Stadium cost.So it’s an obvious part of the built sporting heritage of the city and it can be seen clearly from several vantage points. But some other significant venues are almost hidden from public view, while others have almost vanished altogether. Actually this is part of the evolution from Lansdowne Road to the Aviva Stadium that concrete grandstand very much of its time built in 1925 and then just before demolition and the process of this magnificent glass structure. I remember whenever Castlecourt or maybe it was the Waterfront Hall in Belfast was built and it was just between ceasefires I think and no body could believe that anybody would build a glass structure in Belfast made of glass. It’s a sign of a peaceful society that you could have a signature building in your city built of glass.But that grandstand actually echoes, the one at Lansdowne road echoes in some ways this is the grandstand in Baldoyle Racecourse. Racing in Baldoyle began in 1829 on the Deer Park, on a course laid out by racing enthusiast and landowner, Thomas, Third Earl of Howth. There was a slight hiatus then in the 1840s but racing returned to Baldoyle in 1853. The site was perfect as it was served by Drogheda and Howth Railway Company, which regularly sponsored races. The races at Baldoyle became hugely popular. They were cheap to attend, and the racecourse was not enclosed, so there were also popular with hawkers, tricksters and pickpockets who could work the crowds. And one of the reasons for enclosing sports grounds through the course of the 19th century was to keep the tricksters and hucksters out or at the very least make money out of the money they were going to make. So that regulation of the populace, of those who assembled at racetracks was very much part of the development of sporting sites throughout the 19th century. In the twentieth century, Baldoyle continued to have an important place in Ireland’s sporting history and its reinforced concrete stand (by Donnelly, Moore and Keatinge in 1919) heralded the beginning of the influence of modernism on sporting architecture. This is the first of its kind in Ireland and it was built for Baldoyle in 1918, that bold, plain concrete appearance was radical. But in 1973 the insurers could no longer insure the grandstand and so in part because of that racing ceased at Baldoyle in the 1970s. And now the area, there is an old, we have one hoof of it stands here, you can see on the left and on right - amazingly I think Carlow Rugby Club bought the jockey changing rooms in 1972 and moved them themselves from Baldoyle to Carlow, and they are still there. It’s a lovely little corrugated iron building and we still have that left from the very famous, one of the most famous racecourses in the world and now these are all that remain. There are two thousand houses on the site where Baldoyle racecourse used to be.There was racing as well in the Phoenix Park. Racing began there in 1901, and the Phoenix Plate for two-year-olds was held over five furlongs until 1913 and was the richest race in the country, surpassing even the Irish Derby at the time. But the popularity of racing in Phoenix Park dropped after its heyday in the 1950s, and ceased altogether in 1990. The land is also now apartment blocks.So, the history of sporting sites in Dublin shifts and changes – and this was particularly true of the years of the boom, and it seemed to us that no body was paying any attention as apartment blocks gobbled all before them. That development across the city, nobody - well people did I suppose - I often quote John Healy “but no shouted stop!” So it was clear that a great deal of the Irish sporting landscape was changing and, not only were we not recording this change, we had no clear record of what had been there in the first place. So you can have - it was possible to have vast tracts, the amount of land a racecourse takes up, and that could go and houses could be put up over it and nobody had any real record, it would just disappear from view.So, in setting up the Irish Sporting heritage Project, which was the brainchild of Mike Cronin of Boston College-Ireland, our first aim was to compile a record of the sporting sites of Ireland. The Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport was already attempting to audit its facilities through county councils but we were attempting to do something slightly different: we wanted to map the sporting landscape of Ireland over the last 150 years. Almost impossible a task.We have approached the project as historians and that makes a difference, it gives a different dimension to the audit of facilities that the county councils have undertaken. We see sporting sites as social spaces so we want to reach an understanding of their significance in Ireland historically, politically, economically and culturally. We want to retrieve the stories that these locations hold, the memories, the tensions, the social networks and hierarchies, which they have reinforced or challenged. And actually the two papers which have preceded this one are perfect examples of the way in which sporting clubs and sporting sites operate within communities and form ties and form associations, but create outlets and networks, and as Hilary said at the end of her paper they also reflect, and then also Ciarán very clearly laid out with Bohemian the way in which they reflect the broader history of the city. This is not simply a history of one small group of people they all have to contacts into the broader society and we wanted to use the sites in which sport had been played to tell these stories and to link into the broader social, political and economic history of Ireland.So I’ve got a website, I’ll just do a little plug for it. The Irish Sporting Heritage website irishsportingheritage.com. And you can see we have the database up and this is what it looks like. It’s done by county and by sport, so you can put in search ‘hockey in Dublin’ or ‘tennis in Dublin’ or anywhere around the country. Or you can put in your keyword. So please look it up and if your club is not properly represented or not represented at all or if there is something you know about I’d be really delighted to have the information.And it is important that these, that these sites are recorded I think. I was looking recently through a history of architecture in Dublin and I looked up the Phoenix Park and they have listed every gate lodges and monument in the Phoenix Park and they don’t mention sport. It seemed extraordinary to me. So there’s a real blindness. And I’m also putting together a dictionary entry for the Dictionary of Irish Architecture on sporting sites and it’s really, really hard to get the information. But the information, people in Ireland hold that information; it’s held informally in their heads, in their attics, in their memories and histories. It’s not held in official places so that’s why this archive is hugely important because it will be a common place where people can come to retrieve that information.So I am just going to show you two maps. I won’t spend too much time on them, but I really like these two maps that’s why I’m going to show you them, to give you a sense of how it works on a national scale and then I’ll talk specifically about Dublin. This map I found; 1916 there’s somebody sitting there with their ballpoint pen, it’s like a little manuscript because there’s nothing else to do in 1916 but put all the golf clubs in Ireland onto a map and you can see really clearly on this map how important the railway networks were to the development of sport in Ireland. So that when we think of the sporting map of Ireland we can see multiple maps. It’s all about associations and transport links and networks. And there you have it very clearly I think there are only three that aren’t located very close to a railway line. And this one here as well in terms of the sporting map and landscape. I went through all the sporting calendars through the 19th century and what you see with the racing calendars, what you see is a much more informal process at the end of the 19th century and eventually becomes much more formalized, so that the number of racecourses becomes reduced, reduced and reduced until I think there are 25 or 30 today. But look this is a an all Ireland map, look at the North East and the North West and what you see now is there were point-to-points throughout Ulster. But the racing calendar when I was going through it I was thinking I’m from County Antrim, I was thinking “I’ve not seen anything from County Antrim in this”. You know obscure places but I thought I’d surely know them. So a sporting map of Ireland is also a religious map of Ireland. It will also tell you a story about the relationship between Presbyterianism and gambling in Ireland. So sport can tell us almost anything we ask of it, you know it can tell us about the position of women in society, it can tell us about class politics, about urban development, about the difference between the shipyard culture in Belfast and the less industrialized aspect of Dublin culture. It tells us all of these stories. So if we map and record it we have a whole new way to approach history.So what kinds of stories are being told by the city? I suppose that’s one of the things I’m going to look at today.I will first say something about the way in which history is impacted into the way in which it’s located in the places where sport has been played, even when the name changes or even when stands are changed one by one, and even when the location itself changes, there still is a traceable memory of sport in that area. I suppose I would be interested to hear what you think of that; I’m not saying anything definitive, I’m just throwing out a few thoughts on it.Then I will look at the relationship between sporting sites and social structures in Dublin.Then I will say something briefly about the way in which economic matters influenced the development of sport, and Ciarán has already alluded to some of those things. So it’s just a brief overview and really the interest for me would much more what you have to say and the information that’s held out there, rather than the information I have already.So some places are no longer in existence like Baldoyle racecourse and the Phoenix Park, they are half remembered, and still just about traceable. For others, like the former home of Shamrock Rovers, which was also victim to developers, there is a determination to remember. So the fans erected this little [monument] to Shamrock Rovers, and in my other incarnation, my other interest is the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. So I’ve looked at commemorations to the Rising around the country, and I have to say that challenges many of them in its commitment and grandeur, you won’t see a better commemorative monument anywhere in the country really. And it shows these places matter to people, sporting sites matter to the communities in which they take place.So fans do have a strong sense of loyalty to the location and history of the place, if at times, not the name. The Aviva stadium has been described by its architects Populous as ‘the first truly site responsive stadium of its kind in the world. Its form, mass, materials and aspect are defined by the site and its surrounds’. So they see it very clearly located in that part of Dublin. Dublin rugby fans said very little about the renaming of their national stadium on Lansdowne Road but they might have been more exercised if it had been decided to relocate it to Thomond Park in Limerick. There was some talk of the headquarters of rugby - you know there is a perfectly good stadium in Limerick why don’t we relocate it there. They made enough noise about having to travel to the North side of the city for a few years, I don’t know what they, what rugby fans would have said about having to go to Limerick. So you can see these links to places, sometimes it’s the name, sometimes it’s the place, but it’s no accident where these sporting grounds build up. These grounds are embedded in the social, cultural and economic environment in which they are located. They remain as markers of how the city itself evolved.Speaking of the North side a familiar ground, the headquarters of the GAA. Working on Irish sporting heritage, a lot of people think Irish sporting heritage is just the GAA because it’s the Irish Sport, but it’s not of course, everything that takes place in Ireland is part of the Irish heritage. But this is a photo of Croke Park in 1948. Look Croke Park has seen several phases of development and alteration. It is an extraordinary venue. It’s Europe’s oldest modern stadium, it predates the Stade de France by several years. As well as being the first of its type, the building is probably the largest ever built in Dublin in terms of mass.But of course when Frank Dineen bought the ground in 1908 for £3,250 the site in Jones’s Road was very different. He made improvements to the pitch and added terracing, and the ground had already evolved by the time the GAA bought it off him in 1913 and called it Croke Memorial Park.But Croke Park is a very good example of the way in which a site can modernize without losing its sense of history. It has been renovated many times, most dramatically through the four phase development begun in the 1980s, which culminated in 2005 with the opening of the ‘new Hill 16’, that’s what it was called. Even those words give some idea of how successfully Croke Park has negotiated this transition. How much of the original rubble from Sackville Street remains on Hill 16? There can’t be very much. But it’s important to people that some of it’s there and it’s still on the official tour “This is made up of the rubble from Sackville Street”. No matter how unpopular the Catholic clergy becomes in Ireland and I was watching Sky News about how they couldn’t sell their 2,000 tickets to see the Pope. No matter how unpopular the Catholic Clergy is I can’t imagine how GAA fans would respond to the changing of the name Croke Park; say we don’t want a ground called for an archbishop. That sense of history is very, very important. Or how would people respond if Croke Park was to be moved somewhere else? The GAA knows very well that its place in Irish society is also connected to its place in Irish history. It is a core part of the GAA brand, which is not to diminish it, it’s also a core part of its culture. As with the national stadium, GAA clubs across the country use the naming of grounds and clubs as a way of remembering both historical and religious figures and William Murphy had that brilliant list of the names of clubs in the 1920s in the wake of the Rising and during the War of Independence and currently there’s Parnell Par and the Wild Geese, Thomas Davis and Round Tower, being some of the names that are used to connect GAA grounds and clubs very clearly to the broader history of the country.And that’s Croke Park today. I mean that’s quite, that’s quite a journey really. But there’s the new Nally stand so you keep the name.Think again of an aerial view of Dublin and some of the expansive areas in which sport has been played, they tell us about which groups had access to land in some ways in nineteenth century Ireland. We can see the ways in which formalized sport with its built facilities were first part of an elite leisure culture. And if we think in particular I suppose a good example of that is the Phoenix Park. The first recorded cricket match in Ireland took place in the Phoenix Park in 1792 for a wager of 500 guineas between the Garrison and “All Ireland”. The future Duke of Wellington, who was then the aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant, is reputed to have participated on the Irish side. And with that kind of elite background nevertheless the Phoenix Park is now the most important multi-sports venue of Dublin. Despite the fact that when people tell the history of it and when you do the tours they’ll take you to the Zoo but they won’t take you to the sporting sites. Even though that’s how most people experience the Phoenix Park. So we have this great variety of things happening: motor racing, speed trials – in terms of the modern world coming to Ireland sport was one of the things that really did that. The Gordon Bennett motor race that was held in 1903 in Carlow, Kildare and Laois. They reckon there were about 300 cars in Ireland in 1903 and 350 cars came over on one boat to see the Gordon Bennett Motor Race. I mean imagine what that does to a society. And they had speed trials a lot in the Phoenix Park in the early 20th century and the motor racing in 1929 was the precursor of the Grand Prix and 100,000 people turned up in the Phoenix Park to see that. So the spectacle of sport and the memory, because we all remember the big sporting moments, I’d say people from Tipperary will be talking about last Sunday for a long time; but we remember those moments.Look at this, another space within Dublin that tells you about I suppose where an elite played at one point but now there’s more general access. Games had been prohibited in the college by Trinity’s seventeenth century statues, but to prevent students taking their exercise outside college walls, the authorities acceded to the demands for sporting facilities over the next 300 years and now it’s one of the key things that visitors notice about Dublin when they look over the wall on the 46a and see people playing cricket and they see the Pavilion. So it’s very much part of Dublin’s heritage and it’s history. The cricket ground was laid out there in 1842 and, just over ten years later, the football ground was also laid out in Trinity.Sports such as cricket and rugby, associated at the outset with English public schools and the middle classes, spread across Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and we can see through this, not just the social networks of the landed gentry, the British army and railway lines, but also the way in which Irish society was becoming increasingly regulated, and the way it began to adopt sports that were more formalized. What we can see, at the end of the nineteenth century, is the increasing realization that regulating leisure practices benefits and facilitates regulation of society itself. And the GAA was part of that, it was in the game at a particularly important level.So, it is part philanthropy and part common sense that has some employers sponsor teams and, in the case of Guinness, this eventually led to the opening of Iveagh Grounds on the Crumlin Road in 1928. The Brewery had supported the establishment of the St James Gate Athletic and Cycling Union in 1905 but its activities had been limited by the lack of grounds. The Union petitioned the Brewery in the years following the First World War a Trust was formed and eventually the ground was opened by Rupert Guinness in 1928. And at the point at which it was opened it contained a football field, bowling green, grass courts and a pavilion with a grandstand. So you can see in many ways they are international sports, they have a local history, they are as local as Guinness and all the people who worked in the brewery and were part of that. And sports grounds develop out of lots of different reasons communities coming together, employers coming together, the patronage of the landed gentry, all of these different things and each one has a different story to tell.Just very quickly then to signal some of the cricket, tennis clubs, these aren’t as visible as the stadiums but they are part of the community and they show an incredible commitment on the part of people who participate in them. So you have Clontarf and Leinster and these change and evolve. I suppose that is the difficulty for me really, they change but we haven’t necessarily recorded it. You know they’ll say in club histories, it’ll say the Victorian Pavilion was knocked down due to dry rot in whatever year, and then we’ve got this brilliant…and there’s no photo of the Victorian Pavilion and I could weep really. Or somewhere like Herbert Park there’s some great examples of this horseshoe throwing area and the croquet and bowls and tennis, you know all in this part of South Dublin.Another building and Jimmy Magee apparently mentioned it earlier today, I don’t think I have a slide of it, no I don’t, sorry, The National Boxing Stadium. It tells it’s own story. Now boxing is an international sport and fist fighting, pugilism, was one of the most popular sports I suppose in Ireland in the eighteenth century. It was one of the first sports to have a written code. But by the nineteenth century it was seen as very much an unruly, it was difficult to control so the official view of it was that people who attended fistfights were participating in riotous assemblies. So it became quite difficult for it until the introduction of the Queensbury Rules in 1867. So it’s actually an interesting sport in terms of one that was seen as a working class sport, and the class issue is always there in sport but you know, that working class male aggression, it was a danger and then actually it was something that if it was controlled and put into productive use, could actually serve the society. So and we can see that very much then in Ireland, that shift and we see lots of Catholic Young Men’s Societies build boxing clubs and boxing halls. And then with the formation of the Free State boxing actually became quite a central feature as it was seen as a way of training the new police and army. And I suppose it still has…and Jimmy Magee, I saw him launch the Fighting Irish exhibition in Croke Park, you know Ireland has had more success in boxing than in any other sport and yet it isn’t seen as a mainstream sport, and probably isn’t given the recognition it deserves. Anyway with the formation of the Free State and this recognition that in order to be healthy and in order to maintain the strength of the State it was necessary to maintain the physicality of the police and the army, boxing had a particular focus.In 1936 it was decided to build this National Stadium and Frank Aiken who was the Minister of Defence as was the Police Commissioner so it has support at a very high level. Ground from Griffith Barracks was given over to it and it was opened in 1939. And what Jimmy Magee has said what is the most remarkable thing about it is that this building is the fact, that the Irish Amateur Boxing Association is the only amateur boxing association in the world to control, run and own its own National Arena and Stadium.So you can see you know, from the croquet club in Herbert Park, to the National Boxing Stadium on South Circular Road, the number of stories that that tells us about the city. And when they were building the National Stadium it explicitly said in The Irish Times give money because this is a poor person’s sport, so we need to have money. So there was always a recognition of those divisions of class within the sporting environment.Just then as a last example I’ll say something about a very commercial sport, I’m just throwing out some different kinds of sports that you might not necessarily think about whenever you think about Dublin’s heritage. Greyhound racing is a twentieth century invention. It grew in the 1920s and just spread like wildfire from North America, to Britain through Ireland. Flann O’Brien, writing of it in 1940, said that it ‘seemed to fill perfectly a void which (in the absence of horse-racing at night) had existed in the spiritual and intellectual consciousness of the people’. So that desperate need to be able to gamble in the evenings. But what Greyhound Racing had it was, it was very cheap to develop that’s why it became so popular because it didn’t need its own grounds. So you could put the gambling machines, or the gambling areas and the track around existing football grounds and that’s what they did. And at Shelbourne you’ll see that, you know, it’s seen as the headquarters of Greyhound Racing in Ireland. And it’s always been very commercially driven and now I suppose we can see that very much in the way Greyhound Stadiums have developed. Although there are still some that share tracks, the Galway Greyhound Track shares its grounds. So there are lots of different ways, so you can see also the Speedway that was quite a short lived but quite an important part of Shelbourne’s experience in Dublin.So we can see if we think of the Dalymount Parks, the Croke Parks, Shelbourne, the private clubs, the Phoenix Park, Trinity College, the Boxing Stadium there are hundreds of stories of Dublin’s heritage that really we are trying to collect and get as much information about as we can. And in turn these sites tell us something about the changes in social lives, economics, attitudes to health, and to leisure. So that the history of sport in Dublin is also the story of how the city and its people have grown and developed over time. Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Transcript of 'That Field of Glory: Historical and Antiquarian Perspectives on The Battle of Clontarf', by Dr Colm Lennon, on Tuesday 1 April 2014 at 1pm, in Dublin City Hall.

Kildare is a county that is steeped in rich culture from the horse racing fields of the Curragh to the beautiful canals that flow through villages and towns like Sallins and Athy.  The Grand Canal is an ideal place for activities like angling, boating, canoeing, sailing and rowing, the banks of the canal are very popular for walking and cycling. There are many former churches and castles dotted around Kildare that add to the scenery of this fine Irish county.St Patrick’s College Maynooth (below, click image to view larger version) was founded in 1795 as a seminary for the education of priests and by 1850 had become the largest seminary in the world.  The Bishops began to look for a site and it was desirable that the college be near Dublin.  This seminary was urgently needed because in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had not been possible to educate Catholic priests in Ireland.  The chapel, built by public subscription, was initiated by Charles W. Russell, President from 1857 to 1880.  St Patrick’s College also has a university as part of the campus.  Thousands of students from the four corners of Ireland and abroad attend the university each year.Naas Courthouse (below, click image to view larger version) was constructed in 1807 to a design by Architect Richard Morrison, it was extended in 1860 when the four columned portico was positioned as it is today.  The Naas Courthouse was the original meeting place of the Poor Law Guardians who held their monthly meetings as did their successors Kildare County Council, from 1899 until the building was badly damaged by fire in the 1950s, which caused them to move to St. Mary’s.  The Criminal Courtroom was the setting for many films, due to its remarkable resemblance to the Old Bailey in London.Theobald Wolfe Tone one of the leaders of the 1798 Rebellion, was a leading figure in the United Irishmen Irish Independence movement and is regarded as the father of Irish Republicanism.  After his death he was buried at Bodenstown, Kildare in 1798 near to Sallins where his family had a farm (below, click image to view larger version).The Japanese Gardens (below, click image to view larger version) were devised by Colonel William Hall Walker, a wealthy Scotsman from a famous brewing family, the gardens were laid out by Japanese master horticulturist Tassa Eida and his son Minoru.  Their aim was, through trees, plants, flowers, lawns, rocks and water, to symbolise the ‘Life of Man’.  That plan was completed to perfection and Eida’s legacy is now admired by the 150,000 visitors who soak up the peace of the gardens every year.In conclusion Kildare is a great place for either a short visit or holiday and Kildare also has a good transport network. From my work scanning the photographs I noticed that bicycle and horse and cart were popular forms of transport in the 1950s. Click images below to see larger versions. . The Fáilte Ireland Tourism Photographic Collection was donated to Dublin City Library and Archive.  The black and white negatives and colour slides date from the 1930s until the 2000s, they give a significant amount of visual information about Kildare throughout the decades.About our Guest BloggerThis blog post was submitted by Deirdre Coleman while on work experience in Dublin City Library and Archive, October 2016. 

Did you know that W.B. Yeats was born in Dublin?That his family were resident in Howth and Terenure during his teenage years?That he lived for substantial periods of his life in Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares?That his family and many of his closest friends were staunch Dubliners?That his final home was in Rathfarnham?View Yeats and Dublin: its People and Places image galleryThe connection between the poet and the city is often underestimated, partly because of Yeats's own close identification with the west of Ireland. But the people and places of the capital played an important part in his development as a poet and as a person, not just during his formative years, but throughout his life.Further ResourcesIn addition to these photographs, Dublin City Public Libraries also include further sources on the social and cultural history of Dublin, some of which are available online and some through the Dublin City Public Libraries network.The Reading Room, Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street holds a wealth of material on the history of Dublin, including books, pamphlets, journals, street directories, and almanacs.The following online resources can be accessed free of charge at your local library (access links via our NetVibes portal). Ask library staff for information and assistance.Libraries and Archives Digital Repository: Digital records relating to Dublin, including photographs, postcards, letters, maps and ephemeral material. Highlights of the collection include the Fáilte Ireland Photographic Collection, Wide Street Commission Map Collection (1757-1851), the Irish Theatre Archive and the Birth of the Republic Collection, which comprises material from the period of the foundation of the Irish state.Irish Times Digital Archive: This online archive service gives access to contemporary editions of the Irish Times from the mid-nineteenth century until the present.Irish Newspaper Archive: This online archive service gives access to contemporary editions of the Irish Independent and a range of other newspapers.The Ireland-JSTOR Collection: This online archive of academic articles can also be accessed free of charge at your local library.For further reading, consult the Library Catalogue. 

Listen to Liz D’Arcy talk about conserving the Wide Street Commission Maps. Hear how she painstakingly removed sellotape, cleaned, repaired and strengthened these important maps.   Liz D'Arcy, Paperworks, Studio for Paper Conservation is qualified with an MA in Conservation of Fine Art on Paper. Liz is an accredited member of the 'Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic works in Ireland' (I.C.H.A.W.I) and a member of the 'Irish Professional Conservators and Restorers Association' (I.P.C.R.A).Between 1757- 1851, the Wide Street Commission had a major impact on the development of the city, transforming it from a medieval city to the Dublin we know today.  Its function was to provide “Wide and Convenient Streets” for Dublin and it had extensive powers to acquire property by compulsory purchase, develop new streets, demolish buildings and impose design standards on building lots which were sold to developers. Dublin City Archives hold the Wide Street Commission Archives, which comprises maps, minute books and drawings. www.dublincityarchives.ieRead more about the conservation project and view Wide Street Commission map collection image gallery.Search and browse the Archive of the Wide Street Commission Maps online.Conserving Wide Street Commission Maps - TranscriptAudio only:Recorded at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 at Dublin City Archives' 'Living in Georgian Dublin' seminar. Part of Heritage Week 2016 programme.Dublin City Archives is grateful to the Heritage Council of Ireland for funding under the Heritage Management Project Scheme 2016 to conserve 23 Wide Street Commission Maps in 2016. Conservation NoticeIn order to reduce handling damage and to ensure the long term preservation of these fragile maps, all researchers are requested to view the digitised images in the first instance. High-Res versions can be provided on request. Viewing of original maps is strictly by appointment only: please apply to [email protected]. Please note: A minimum of 3 days notice is required to process your request and a maximum of 10 maps may be ordered per visit. 

Alleys, annals and anecdotes: a new look at Gilbert's History of Dublin given by Séamas Ó Maitiú, on Thursday 23rd January 2014 at 6.00pm, at Dublin City Library & Archive, Pearse Street, Dublin 2.

Listen to Gregory Connor Talk.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Gregory Connor, Professor of Finance at NUI, Maynooth, talks about the effect of Ireland joining the Euro, and how things may have worked out differently if our banking regulatory system had been stricter. He also addresses the housing situation, mortgage arrears and how Ireland might get out of debt. This talk, one of a series on the Irish Economy, was recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in March 2012.Great thanks so much Padraic, thanks for having me, I hope you all get something from this talk and thanks for coming, so I really wanted to cover three things here.  I want to talk about the Eurozone that’s the currency we are in, along with 16 other European countries not including the UK and as you know it’s in a bit of a crisis at the moment, so I’ll talk about the Eurozone, what’s wrong with it, how the crisis evolved, then I’m going to talk in particular most of what I want to talk about is the Irish situation in particular, how the Irish banks got Ireland into so much trouble and where things stand at the moment from the perspective of Ireland in the Eurozone crisis and then last thing I’ll talk about the future, is Ireland and is the Eurozone on a path to get out of this and what are the likely outcomes I’ll just briefly discuss on that. So I want to start with a picture of John Kenneth Galbraith, he’s a late 20th Century witty Canadian American economist.  Actually coming back into favour now, but he talked a lot about fads, social fads and the influence of social delusions and business fads on the economy and he did a lot of work in particular about how the 1920’s, roaring 20’s led to the Great Depression and it has a lot of resonance now in fact in what happened in the noughties as they call it, the 2000, the 2008 period and how that led to the current crisis, but in particular as I said he was quite witty, one of his witticisms was “The great thing about being an economist is the more you screw up the more they need you” and it’s true the last few years as an economist, you get more and more attention to what you are saying, whereas people always ignored you during the noughties.  All of a sudden we are very stylish in giving talks like this okay which is a bad thing okay and maybe that needs to go away.  I want to lay my cards on the table and say I’m not one of the economists who’s going to come in here and say I told you this would happen, I missed it okay, I screwed up, in fact I do risk modelling, financial risk modelling so I just say, I am not one of the people who can claim I saw it coming.  What I say about the past is with hindsight and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.Okay so first I want to talk about the Euro, okay the Euro is this currency zone, now in seventeen countries which is a locked in set of exchange rates where these basically all the countries are in the same currency and as you know it’s causing enormous dislocation problems in many of the countries, really throughout the zone from Germany to Portugal the Euro is problematic.  Why did we do it? What was the reason for the Euro?  Okay, let’s look in particular the financial reasons, because there are successes associated with the Euro.  This is one of the big reasons for the Euro and if you understand this graph, you will understand not only the reasons for the Euro or one of the reasons for the Euro but the problems in the Euro.  This is the relationship between the Italian Lira and the German Deutschmark from 1980 till 2009, throughout that period Italy, the Central Bank in Italy and the Italian Government had one goal with their exchange rate policy, this graph was not to slope downwards, okay that was their goal that was their overriding goal.  This line was to be straight okay and that was what they tried to do for 20 years, did they succeed, no they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed.  It just went, it continued to slope down for 20 years as they fought and fought and fought to keep it strong, to keep the Lira strong, a hard money policy and they just couldn’t do it okay.  The political system just didn’t allow them to do it.  The Union said ah we know they are not credible, we know they are going to relax the exchange rate, so we are going to bid up our wages okay, because we know they won’t go through with it.  The pensioners as well said we need more pension money because we know they are going to, they are going to inflate away any gains, everyone the political system, everything worked against what was their key motivation and it failed, except at the end, once they locked into the Euro it worked, okay all of a sudden Italy had a hard currency, note at the end once it’s in the Euro, because they are the same currency as Germany, they now have a hard currency relevant to Germany, so in fact there’s a success, Italy now has a hard currency, as does Ireland, as does Portugal, as does Belgium and even France because France had the same desire and the same though not as dramatic the same failure throughout this period.  So all these currencies which wanted hard money now have hard money okay so there’s your success, now there are other issues of course.  There’s the issue of trade and the no need to exchange currency as you move across borders, but this is really from the financial side, the key motivation for the Euro and in a sense it worked, we got what we asked for, okay but many people see why did it have to be such a brittle system?  Why did this Euro system have to be so inflexible and brittle, that was not a bug in the Euro design, that was a feature you know the term, the joke that programmers say, when you say there’s a bug in your programme, your computer programme that’s not a bug it’s a feature okay, that’s true of the Euro.  Its brittleness was intended, it’s a feature of the Euro that it’s brittle, okay that was how the Italian State was able to lock in a hard currency by forcing the system so that it cannot leave.  If the Euro were a system where Italy could be in the Euro but it can leave any time it would never have had a hard currency, it would have lasted three months and then the demands of the system for a soft currency would have overwhelmed it, so the locking in is part of the success of the Euro, and this is actually a very old strategy.  This is a third century mosaic and that is Odysseus and if you remember the story of Odysseus what does he do, he locks himself onto the ship’s mast and I have a quote here about this is from Homer’s Odyssey okay, okay it says this is Circe telling Odysseus how he can listen to the siren’s, the siren’s are these lovely singing magical creatures on two sides of the straight and they are sailing through the straight and anyone who hears the sirens is so enchanted by the beautiful singing that they are drawn off the straight and narrow path and into the rocks okay so what does Odysseus do?  “He must drive straight on past but melt down sweet wax and honey and with it stuff your committed companions ears so none can listen, the rest that is but if you yourself are wanting to hear them, then have them tie you hand and foot on the fast ship standing upright against the mast with the ropes ends lashed around it, so that you can have joy in hearing the song and the sirens but if you suffocate your men and implore them to set you free, then they must tie you fast and even more lashings.”  This worked too okay.  Odysseus got to hear the sirens and he sailed safely through the straights by locking himself onto the mast okay and that’s what we’ve done, we now have a hard currency, so does Greece, so does Italy.  We didn’t matter in that sense but Italy mattered and France mattered, so one of the key motivations is to lock in, create a brittle currency system where we have to have a hard currency system okay. This was not really the key issue for Ireland.  For Ireland why did Ireland go along?  Well Ireland was very I’m sorry where’s Ireland, okay I want to talk about Germany, then I’ll talk about Ireland, what about Germany?  Why did Germany go along with such a system?  Okay well you probably remember Fawlty Towers, there’s a running joke on Fawlty Towers, they have German guests come in and Basil Fawlty would say don’t talk about the war okay, don’t talk about the war with the Germans and then of course you would end up talking about the war because he would put his foot in his mouth okay.  Well I worked in the city in the late nineties, in the city of London and I used to visit clients, I was selling risk management systems okay, and I’d visit clients and client support would always whisper to me, don’t talk about the Euro as a problem, they are German clients, don’t talk about problems with the Euro, so I’d stand up here and I’d have to make sure I didn’t say anything negative about the Euro, because the Germans just had this emotional commitment.  It was really the same thing, it was basically liberal anti-nationalism, the Germans just felt we are good Europeans, we want everyone to be one body, so it’s actually a good thing, but it did make them blind okay, the Belgian’s, the German’s, the Dutch, the hard currency countries were blind to the failures of the Euro, why?  Basically for good motivation they believed partly it’s not the whole story but partly, they believed in liberal anti-nationalism, they wanted to take the hard currency, the Deutschmark and share it okay to bring Europe together, so the German’s are partly to blame but partly their blindness was in a sense motivated positively to a good extent okay, so there isn’t really just goodies and baddies, there’s blindness for good motivation, okay that’s another thing that happened.  They certainly were blind, the Germans allowed Greece into the Eurozone.  Now looking back at that, that was a ridiculous decision, again with hindsight the idea that Greece, Italy coming in is marginal and it seemed to possibly work, but Greece coming in was clearly you know grossly in error, so they clearly were blinded okay by something okay. What about the Irish?  Well the Irish didn’t really matter okay they didn’t matter much but they were welcome okay Ireland was welcomed, why did the Irish join?  Well it wasn’t so much the hard currency, Ireland did not have the same experience as Italy with a constant depreciation of its currency, it didn’t manage in many cases to keep a peg for instance to the British Pound but Ireland was also enthusiastic.  Most financial economists in Ireland and it was basically because they saw it as the chance to lower their cost of investment.  This is their cost of investment under a small more peripheral currency like the Punt.  Joining a big currency area like the Euro okay was going to lower the cost of investment and that was going to increase investment.  This was what many Irish economists, myself among them and someone who is at this point interested in visiting Ireland okay, this is what we believe, we are going to lower our cost of investment and increase investment because the cost of the funds was going to decline when we move from being a small peripheral currency with all the risk associated with that, to a member of a big currency block okay locked in at hard currency rates.  What did we get?  Well something worse, something that we didn’t really predict which was over investment a credit flood okay, Ireland got a credit flood.  In fact looking back we realised there was so much investment for bad reasons, bad business decisions, bad regulatory decisions, that in fact many of the investments were negative in their returns, so we were actually getting, we were throwing money at investment projects okay with negative return.  When I see we there, that’s the business interests and the business community in particular the banks and property developers together, were taking German money and poor money and throwing it away because of self managerial, self interest okay. I’m going to look in a little more detail what happened in Ireland but basically this is the key thing, it was essentially a credit flood, we had a flood of foreign credit when we joined this big currency zone and had bad financial regulation, okay let’s look now in more detail of Ireland, sort of work out the steps of where this, how this affected our banks and one in particular happened.  This is the asset side of the Irish banking system, keep in mind with banks assets and liabilities, it’s like my right side is your left side, the same with banks, their assets side is your liability side, so you have mortgages you think on them as liabilities, for a bank mortgages are assets.  Credit card debt we think of them as liabilities, those are assets to banks.  You might have a savings account, to a bank that’s a liability, but that’s an asset to you.  You might have a checking account that’s your asset, their liability, so this is their asset side business and individual’s liability side and let’s look at what happened to these banks.  The red bar is the key thing here, this is property development.  In traditional commercial banking it should be zero.  Property development is not considered an appropriate activity for a commercial banks, they are only supposed to lend for property in the traditional view, where they already have the red one locked in, so short term last minute banking otherwise it’s supposed to be equity.  And what we can see is that exploded over the noughties period, so the red part just grew enormously okay, so on the asset side you had a big growth of property development which is in fact not even an appropriate activity for banks and as we now know there was some very bad investment decisions.  There was also a lot of growth of mortgages okay, so on the asset side way too much property development growth and also quite strong, probably too strong growth in mortgages.  What about on the liability side?  Where was the money coming from?  It was coming from foreign borrowing, the banks were paying for these very risky investments by borrowing from foreign mostly Eurozone banks okay, so they were taking short term money from foreign banks and using it for very speculative investment so this is if you follow kind of you know the entrails of what happened in the crisis this is a little bit old news but that’s the key thing and here again this red area is the key one along with the yellow one this is foreign borrowing okay.  Now the yellow one is a little bit less bad because it is not coming out of, it’s all going into foreign lending okay, whereas red is actual foreign borrowing being used recycled back into the domestic lending.  Note this borrowing is what’s called “Hot Money”, these are quickly reversed okay and note here you can see it climbing down, this is the hot money drifting out of Ireland okay.  A lot of these are very short term institutional deposits and short term bonds that the foreign banks can you know liquidate at their pleasure okay. Well what we do in economics, to look at policy and sort of understand what went wrong is what’s called counter factual policy analysis.  What we do and you know a standard tool is we take a decision in the past and we want to think about was that a good decision or a bad decision, what were the implications of it, we remove it and then we create a new history.  We say let’s change an old decision and let’s see how key it was because we know how the decision feeds through the system, let’s change that decision and see what the system would look like okay.  It’s just like, I like the picture of Gwyneth Paltrow Sliding Doors okay, that is basically the same idea.  There’s this movie where Gwyneth Paltrow is running onto a train and in one reality she makes it onto the train okay and then she gets home and she finds her boyfriend cheating on her with another girl and her life goes one way, okay and the other reality she hesitates and misses her train and her life goes another way okay well that’s basically counterfactual simulations.  Now I’m going to do that for a minute this was work with Brian O’Kelly on the Irish banks.  What would have happened if we had been slightly more sensible in financial regulation during the bubble period okay, well in fact with a little bit of a change in bank regulation okay most of the Irish problems would have gone away okay.  Most of the crash would have gone away and thinking through that reality, so now we are in a different reality, we are in a made up reality, where the Irish Central Bank and the Irish Financial Regulator prevented the banking sector from taking these extremely risky bets on property development funding by net foreign borrowing okay.  Just make them more sensible, reasonable regulation it’s called prudent regulation, that little change would have really changed the outcome okay, so here’s the asset side when we enforce the condition that property development cannot be more than ten per cent of stable liabilities which are domestic deposits which are on the other side okay.  So you can only have ten per cent property development assets relative to domestic deposits okay and we also put in the condition a note you change the, you drastically reduce this scary red part okay, which caused the problems on the asset side.  We do the same thing on the liability side here we forced the net foreign borrowing to be cut.  Again this should have been controlled by the financial regulator and it wasn’t, so let’s control it okay, so this is our simulated reality which is allowing the system to be more prudent in its behaviour okay and those things go away, what would happen to the Irish economy?  Well you would have much, you know obviously by construction you would come into the 2008 Lehman Brothers cut crash with a much more stable banking system, so you are coming along here, here’s the crash, the system is much more stable, than in that reality in terms of your exposures to property risk and for hot money foreign borrowing okay, you would also have a more stable borrowing okay.  This is the borrowing side, so here we have our net foreign borrowing, the GDP that’s both on the asset and liability side a much more stable environment okay.  It actually would have after the 2008 crash eliminated a lot of the ... we would be just like most other European countries with just a little bit of a change in our financial regulation, you will see this has implications as we think about whose fault it is and what needs to go, happen going forward okay.  With this obviously there would be a big change in net foreign borrowing right, by construction, so we wouldn’t have this big overhang that the banks all of a sudden as you remember in September 2008 the banks all went bust, they effectively all went bust, because all that “Hot Money” all that net foreign borrowing left and the Government was how are we going to replace it?  Well first it put in the guarantee, that didn’t work and then it went into an IMF Programme okay, because it had to replace all that “Hot Money” which disappeared in a flash okay.  But here’s the interesting thing, it wouldn’t have been such a lovely period for you all okay, you remember those years they were wonderful growth years, why were they wonderful growth years?  For false reasons, it was fake income okay, it was generated by imprudent borrowing of the domestic banks from foreign banks, so all that wonderful 2003 to 2007 growth was phony okay and if we eliminate, if we bring in prudent regulation a whole lot of growth disappears okay, so in a sense this was already spent okay and now we have to in a sense pay it back and that’s where the ECB, that’s where the you know European Commission and even IMF were telling us you already had the good times, now you have to pay the cost okay, that’s one way to interpret it.  Right in fact if we look here this is your GDP, there’s your extra GDP you got by having bad decisions.  Note it’s only negative at the end okay obviously you continue here, it’s got to in a sense if you believe in you know a just universe, all of this has to be balanced on the negative side right, that would be the Greek tragedy solution right.  If Homer did this, that would all go away so we would pay it all back right.  In fact here it is just graphically, there’s Ireland if we would have done things right.  Now again this is a simulated reality and what do we see in the purple line, this purple line here is Ireland without imprudent banking regulation which allows this credit inflow right, a lot less growth and in fact you know it’s sort of you are losing more than you are benefitting so far, so obviously this has to continue for quite a while, right this yellow line to make it equal because the yellow is the reality, the purple is the simulated reality.  Well if you are going to get rid of all that growth, that fake growth, you know it’s going to be paid back and it clearly is right because something you know, we are in a sense going to pay all that back one way or the other okay.So that’s sort of a review of the Euro, a little bit about Ireland, now I want to just for my last little bit, I want to talk about the future and where things stand and what it looks like going forward okay, well we had this big party really.  Right Ireland had a party based on phony money that was poured in via the Euro currency from foreign banks okay.  Now we have to pay it back or some feel we don’t have to but the standard view at least by the ECB and the IMF is we do have to pay it back.  Can we pay it back?  Is it feasible?  That’s the question, well this is the key number okay which is Government debt relative to GDP, if this number is more than about 120 per cent, so you have more debt than you have national income right, annual national income most people feel it can never be paid back.  The reason is what happens it grows with interest and your income doesn’t grow and you can never get to equilibrium, you can never get out of debt, you can never get yourself out of debt as a country.  Okay so above 120 it’s normally considered not feasible and you can see well Ireland are just about hopefully maybe going to miss that, right we will look at some of the other detail.  This is just a generated problem, note this is not the original problem, this debt is generated by poor bank regulation okay, it was not even high when we started back here in 2008 when the problem started the debt wasn’t even high, so this is all coming out of bad decisions in our banking system okay. Let’s look at the banking system it’s just another big problem, when all the net foreign borrowing disappeared it had to be replaced, it had to be paid off with cash.  Banks don’t have cash, a lot of people think when you give cash into a bank, they put it in a big you know drawer in the back, that’s not what happens, the cash goes out immediately.  You put money into your savings account, the next day or the same day they paid it out into someone’s mortgage okay, your savings account isn’t in the bank, it’s in a mortgage okay, so what happened when all these foreign banks say oh give us our money back, they didn’t have any money, in fact their assets were collapsing at the same time right.  They had to get money as extraordinary liquidity support from the Central Banks, that’s one of the roles in the Central Bank, it provides liquidity when banks assets are illiquid okay and an enormous amount right, Irish banks have like 110 billion Euro’s of this emergency liquidity support both from the European Central Bank and in the case where the assets aren’t good enough for the European Central Bank from the Irish Central Bank, okay so these are the assets which aren’t even good enough quality for the ECB to accept them, right and that has to be changed.  That’s supposed to be quote “short term”, that’s supposed to be the Central Bank providing short term liquidity, well it’s already been five years, how many more years is it going to be right, probably five or six.  These are backed by assets, right these are backed by mortgages, property development assets, business loans but they are illiquid right and some of them are of dodgy value, so this is a big problem too.  It isn’t just the Government debt, it’s also the banking system becoming liquid again okay, somehow getting rid of this overhang of emergency liquidity support right.  How can it do that?  Well it’s pretty hard it has to shrink, it has to shrink its asset size to generate cash as people pay off their mortgages and business loans it has to use the funds to pay off this big overhang, to remove this big overhand of emergency liquidity support from the ECB and that’s a really slow process.  You can see here look at how slowly the assets are declining, even though this red line is the stock, the flow of new lending is shrinking drastically, but the stock of outstanding lending is only very slowly inching down and of course it builds on itself as they shrink lending the economy contracts and that feeds back into itself, because of the whole sector you get this aggregate affect.  If they all try to shrink, all that happens with the economy shrinks and it’s very hard for them, so it’s really difficult, there is a difficult problem, so I’m not claiming things are easy here okay, obviously property prices which bubbled up have also you know gone down and that hits banks, right now I’m not going to talk too much about that, I know Ronan Lyons talked about that a week or two ago, but we know property prices have gone down sharply and that’s an issue for banks as well.  More seriously okay, oh yeah and of course another thing about getting back this big overhang of assets, it’s hard for look at here how they’ve caused ,they’ve shot down and this is affecting property prices, the flow of new housing lending, mortgage lending has collapsed, but that isn’t really affected very strongly the assets of the bank, because it’s hard to make property shrink by not building them, because they last for eighty years okay, so this overhang is a very slowly solvable problem, getting into debt is easy and quick, okay getting out of debt as a sectoral system is slow and difficult okay. Now here’s another really serious problem and again I’m just, at this point I’m speculating about the future, this might sink the banking system, this is the increase in mortgage arrears, right mortgage arrears are continuing up and there’s an enormous supply of mortgages, if you go back to those balance sheets and you look at mortgages and you look at the sliver of banking, equity capital, mortgage arrears coming out of those assets any fall in mortgage payments has to come out of that tidy sliver of equity capital and if it overwhelms it the banking system is broke, right and there is a risk here, so this is a real serious risk going forward.  Do I have a solution and do I have an answer?  No but it’s certainly something that is trouble okay.Okay what about you know this is something I put here because just as I finish up, Colm McCarthy who isn’t here but would certainly want this slide, what are we paying for with all this debt?  And we have this big supply of Government debt, you know we are swimming in Government debt, we are approaching sovereign insolvency, where’s it coming from?  Well a lot of it is coming from these bank repayment costs.  This grey line, these green slashed lines here, note that huge chunk in 2010, there was also a big chunk in 2009 and another big chunk in 2011, if it weren’t for these bank repayment costs, even though Ireland would have suffered a big recession, the debt overhang wouldn’t be serious, it would be very you know feasible.  This is making the system close to or possibly insolvent right.  Now this is questionable Colm McCarthy says a lot of that was us paying back foreign banks, it was their fault, they leant us money when they shouldn’t have okay, so it’s partly their fault and we paid them back when we were a State, this is the Irish State, it was private banks, it was Irish Nationwide and Anglo in particular and the other banks making bad decisions, those are private institutions.  What are we as Irish tax payers paying them back okay, well partly to help the other European countries because it’s European banks that lent that money, well that’s questionable and Colm McCarthy feels and it’s very much in the news now we don’t have a responsibility as tax payers for those privately taken on debts okay and that’s a lot of the problem, right I’m not going to take a stand there, you can see it’s a mixed case, we spent that money right, we spent it on ourselves, but it was private money, so you can decide what you think is right or wrong about it, Colm McCarthy thinks we shouldn’t pay it back or maybe not all of it, it’s in the news even now we are fighting with the ECB saying a lot of this money should be paid by the ECB indirectly with money creation, because it isn’t really Irish and the Irish are doing their part let’s have some help and there’s talk about pushing big chunks of it out far into the future using ECB money creation.  So will we make it?  Will Ireland make it as a sovereign through this crisis?  Well this is what’s called a fan chart where you have some possibilities right and the answer is maybe okay as an economist right.  If things turn out well, if growth is reasonable Ireland is going to muddle through this crisis okay, if things turn out badly and growth is poor and the debt goes up there’s going to be another programme and another restructuring and more difficulty, so I don’t feel I’m strong enough and wise enough to make that call.  I do want to finish on an up note, there are good things in Ireland, what’s going to save Ireland if there’s a saviour it’s going to be our export growth, pharma, tech in particular and other export industries.  I know a lot of people talk about agri-food industry it’s had very good years but it can’t generate, it doesn’t have the scale potential to deal with 120 billion debt overhang, whereas tech and pharma and the other export sectors which are actually doing very well at the moment okay, can spin off into the domestic sectors and might make a difference, so if we can get growth and this is a picture of a bunch of techie type people, if we can get growth in the key future industries and this is something that Ireland has done well over the last ten years it’s got lucky, it has picked some good industries okay, it picked a lousy industry in the fifties when it went very heavily on agriculture as the key industry, that was the big mistake we now know okay, but now it seems to have picked some good industries so that’s the hope, it’s the export growth and the possibility that might make the difference and making us coming out on the right end of this painful but feasible grab.  Okay that’s it so let me see if there are questions or comments?  Go ahead.Q & AParticipant 1: My question is multi-pronged, one of them is we know the banks have lent the money and what happens if the banks now have so much mortgages, say for example they have say 20 million mortgages and all of those 20 million, say 10 million comes back and says listen we can’t pay here, how can we pay back, now we have a huge chunk of houses that we can’t offload.Yes okay.Participant 1:  So how do they work through that, that is 1, and, 2, if they don’t lend how does liquidity recycle within this?Yeah that’s absolutely, I mentioned that and that’s very true, one of the problems with the banks is they all want to shrink, so how do they want to shrink, oh they want to stop lending, but if they all stop lending house prices fall, no one can buy houses and then their assets which are effectively the houses, also the client who are they going to sell these repossessed houses to, yeah that’s a very difficult circular problem.  When one bank is in trouble it can just repossess houses and sell them and the whole banking system is in trouble yeah there is an issue that they can’t all sell the houses and not worth, you know not generate new houses, so that just had to be mulled through and there’s no simple solution to that.  Of course there’s no repossessions in Ireland anyway, effectively none, so it’s not a live issue.Participant 1: Finally this is based on the assumption of what if, what is instead of having invested heavily into the mortgage, you know the construction industry, if they had passed the investment onto the production and other sectors, what would it have been like going by the graph?Yeah we didn’t do that, we have put it into business investment and we didn’t do that, I don’t think that was feasible, it was such a flood of credit, it was going to go into, you know it was going to go to speculative property and that’s quite standard if you look around the world, credit flows tend to go into speculative property, because business investment is slow and difficult and you have to establish relationships, it doesn’t tend to have as volatile behaviour that the property development does, so most of the big bubbles generate property related bubbles.  Yes a question here…Participant 2: How do you see financial regulation changing your response to events in the last couple of years, especially when for example when the Euro say in the late nineties, we had the example of the Asian crisis which showed that you know if you liberalise financial markets it might lead to a bubble so how come we didn’t see it then and what makes it different now that we might see it again?Yes well financial regulation in Ireland was particularly bad okay, particularly bad, so if you go back to 2003, 2002 in Ireland you know it wasn’t even at the state as it should have been at that point.  Now of course you know it’s going much, obviously we’ve learned from that mistake and where everyone is tightening including Ireland.  Others made mistakes, the US made huge, you know more globally, more damaging errors in their financial regulation, so there were many errors and the Greek situation which was not on the financial regulation side, rather a national income fraud okay, where they actually fraudulently created their Government debt accounts.  There was a whole another situation, where do I see the financial regulation going?   Well I think probably there will still be problems as there always has been, you know people will find ways around the rules and create problems so that will never disappear.  There will always be smart operators who sneak around the system and create occasional crises, but I don’t think in my lifetime, you know my working life or even my mortal life that will see another financial crisis of this type, however another side which is the regulation of Government borrowing, now that’s changing fundamentally as you know and now we have this fiscal compact that’s just absolutely changing, you’ve heard the word austerity, it’s absolutely the rules are going to change fundamentally, in ways which are not all good alright there’s no one who is going to be flexibility about ah we really ought  to have a new anti-poverty programme and build some new hospitals this year and even if it costs a little more than we have, we will borrow it, that is going to go away okay, it’s going to be a very tight rein on Government spending in the Eurozone.  That’s part of the brittle system, we have locked ourselves on the mast and we made that decision and now we’ve realised part of that decision is we can no longer spend money unless we have it and that’s just locked in now and my opinion.Participant 3:  Is that not a good thing fundamentally for us, I mean we needed to grow up?Yes I think a lot of the economists are now thinking yeah in the long run probably we actually maybe in our mindset, we think about the German’s back you know when they were not talking about the Euro, Germans to characterise them unfairly but you know they do have a little bit of a mindset, a, b, we go this way, we are making, we are walking this way okay and I think they realised that was part of the deal.  The part of the hard currency zone was also you know fiscal austerity that you don’t spend what you don’t have, so that’s what we bought into.  We didn’t know we bought into it but now yes that’s what we bought into okay.Participant 3:  Can I just ask you that wasn’t my question, it’s just I haven’t had the time to read the paper yet, the other day and Mr. Osborne or somebody like that said in England announced that because the banks were not doing their part of the bargain and they were not lending to the small and the medium sized business over there even and we are crying out for that here even more probably, they were going to do a Government level a kind of scheme that they are putting millions in that can be lent to bypass the banks and get this money out to the businesses that need it to run.  We obviously do need our small businesses to get going again to get, if we are to get any to do that curve that they are talking about.  Could we borrow the same thing here?Again we have no funds.Participant 3: But how are they doing it?Well see they have funds because they are an accountant and they control, they can borrow freely to some extent, I mean there are limits even for the British but we have locked ourselves in now to this hard currency system, which means that we don’t really have borrowing opportunities.  The ECB though there is in fact, you know potential the ECB still has flexibility and they have, the ECB to give them credit have recently generated a lot of new credit flows to the banking system, but the banking system is still in an unstable situation, a lot of that has just been transferred effectively to Germany where there’s no need for new credit, so it’s still not flowing properly but the ECB has forced money, forced credit into the banking system through this long term refinancing operation so that and a lot of money like a trillion Euro’s worth of credit over the last few, you know in their programmes will be forced into the Eurozone banking system, but it isn’t a solution a Government programme, no Ireland cannot do that under the fiscal, I don’t think it’s feasible.  Question here.Participant 4: A consequence of the austerity that is sweeping through the Eurozone and the world it seems to me is huge unemployment and can that be countered?Well that you know that’s part, you’re right and a lot of people Paul Condron is a major commentator in the US is very against austerity because of that, it does cut back your budget deficit but at the same time in recessionary times it forces up unemployment.  No there’s no you know, you can Paul Condron thinks we should just go ahead and continue borrowing and there’s a probably a middle ground, I don’t have a solution for you but no they are linked, you can’t spend money to raise employment and at the same time lower your budget deficit, no you can’t get both, you can’t have your cake and eat it too question.Participant 5:  I was under the impression that the Celtic Tiger era began roughly around 1996, 1997 and finished around 2007.  When you were speaking about credit flood you focused on the years 2003 to 2008.Correct, yes there’s the good credit, there’s the good Celtic Tiger and the bad Celtic Tiger, there’s phase one and phase two and Morgan Kelly has a good paper on that.  The first phase was based on productivity growth, so 1997 to 2000, he says 2000 but it might be 2002 okay, 2002 is the date when the Central Bank actually became more liberal in its policies but maybe he claims it’s about 2000, so there was a good Celtic Tiger and a bad Celtic Tiger.  The first one was based on real productivity gain and the second one was based on hard credit influx and you might look at Morgan Kelly’s straight forward paper you know.Participant  6:  They always said before the “R” word was admitted or used there would be jobless recovery, not just in Ireland and America, everywhere they said. Is that the case?In recessions the jobs of the last thing to come.Participant 6:  But will they come eventually, nothing like they were obviously?No I am a financial economist and you really need to ask a labour guy you know, so I won’t answer that question because if someone found out I was claiming I knew about employment you know trends I’d get in trouble yeah.Participant 1: In relation to what you said about unemployment now, I know countries like Japan, China and even Germany at a certain time had to say okay we are in this mess now, what if we just look inwards instead of having to say okay we actually have ... because yeah  I understand this metric thing and the Eurozone policies but if Ireland as a nation is also looking within these walls, shut the doors and let’s see what we can make from home here.Small open is Ireland’s solution, I really think small and open, if we are small and open and small open is the future, in fact that’s the future small and open.  I mean what are these guys doing you know, they are selling around the world that’s the key thing.  Little technologies that are not particularly hot, not particularly fancy sold everywhere.Participant 1:  Reduce the imports.Reduce the what?Participant 1:  Imports rather than...Oh no because they need imports, no, no I don’t think that’s the solution for Ireland, no I have to say, I’d say absolutely not, absolutely not yes.Participant 7:  Just there recently, you know a couple of months ago you had the Government basically calling the banks to reduce the interest rates, you know for the lending like, how can the banks get the money to lend, to try and increase their profits, if they are brought in and say look you can’t do that.Yeah that’s true, yeah that was a very, you know they want bank profits because how are you going to get the banks back to decent situation by having them generate profits, but at the same time you want lending and you don’t want it to be too high cost, yeah you know this whole system is nothing but a balancing act of difficult interlinked problems, that’s what debt, you know unravelling the debt problem is a difficult but when it’s aggregate in this whole economy is a difficult and slow process and whether we will get there is you know, going back to your point you know unemployment Government debt, we have a huge Government debt problem and we have an unemployment problem, how do you solve an unemployment problem?  Government expenditures.  How do you solve a debt problem?  Not having Government expenditures, you know what do you need to get your debt low, you need growth.  How do you get growth?  Spend more but that’s also how you get debt, so yeah there’s all these difficult decisions at the margin, right that’s where we have to hope these guys, you know do a good job selling whatever they are selling.  Go ahead, I better just take two more and we’ve got to stop go ahead.Participant 3:  Tell me you said part of the problem is a kind of what they call a political class, do you see younger political groupings coming up of people in their thirties or forties who are ready to take power or are they all just leaving?  I don’t see anybody new in the media that seem ready to go into Government and replace but when our present crop retire as they will have to eventually and are there people there, are they coming in? Are there people there who could give leadership? Are they coming in? Do you meet people...?That question is beyond me, I do, I didn’t mention but the political class in the noughties, in the second half of the Celtic Tiger did fail in a really spectacular way in financial regulation and property, I mean the Mahon Tribunal issues they are also related to property, so there was a very corrupt system for a developed western economy in the early years of the 21st Century, but how can we replace, sorry I’ve only lived in this country 20 years I’m not old enough, go ahead.Participant 8: Actually similar to what this gentlemen was talking about, I’m just wondering about competitiveness, I mean isn’t that a big issue in terms of the price of everything went up in Ireland and we became less competitive.Correct in the second part of the Celtic Tiger.Participant 8:  Tied back into vested interests and the political class is the sense that there’s still like doctor’s fees, like dentist’s, professional fees are still much higher than they are in the rest of Europe and this is still obviously an issue in terms we obviously have to pay for it, professional fees and we ... the Government has to pay for them.  So I mean it’s tackling that problem.Yes absolutely, I think that absolutely is really you know one of the things to get the economy continuing to, it has had a big improvement in competitiveness over this terrible five year period, but at the same time that has to not stop, but that’s something where they are making progress, there is some slow progress I think on that one, you know.  Okay so thanks very much and I hope you enjoyed and got something.  Thank you.  (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. 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