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The area around the mouth of the River Liffey was inhabited from at least Neolithic times by farmers and fishermen. The great arc of Dublin Bay offered an inviting harbour for sea-going vessels, although its sand banks, shallows, slob lands and treacherous currents proved an obstacle to larger shipping in reaching safe anchorage upriver. This image gallery explores the course Liffey as it runs through the city.

November's Manuscript of the Month is a letter from the Western Front celebrating Robert Downie, “a Victoria Cross Hero”, 1916. The letter is part of the Monica Roberts Collection, one of the most important World War 1 collections of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association and Archive held at Dublin City Library and Archive.

The Orchestra of St Cecilia Collection includes concert programmes, posters, flyers, correspondence, programme notes, recordings, soloists and conductor’ biographies and administrative documents. Access to the collection provides unparalleled insight into the processes involved in professional orchestra and event management from the turn of the twenty-first century through recession times in Dublin. Find out more and view some items from the Orchestra of St Cecilia Collection...Dublin City Library and Archive.

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. 

The following is a transcript of Conserving Wide Street Commission Maps 1757-1849, a talk by Liz D'Arcy.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Liz D’Arcy talks about conserving the Wide Street Commission Maps. Between 1757 and 1851, the Wide Street Commission had a major impact on the development of Dublin, transforming it from a medieval city to the Dublin we know today. Dublin City Archives hold the Wide Street Commission Archives, comprising maps, minute books and architectural drawings. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 as part of the Dublin City Archives' Heritage Week programme.Ellen MurphyLadies and Gentleman, our next speaker is Liz Darcy and Liz is a very talented paper conservator with an MA in Conservation and fine art in paper and she runs her own company Paperwork Studios.  She is an accredited member of the Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works in Ireland and a member of the Irish Professional Conservators and Restoration Association.  She has worked on numerous heritage projects for a variety of different institutions – including Dublin City Archives and her talk today is going to provide an insight into the intricate work involved with the conservation of Wide Street Commission Maps.  Thank you.Liz DarcyThanks for that introduction.  I don’t really need to say anything else about myself. I think you’ve covered it all (laughs).  Just to say, as a paper conservator I specialise in ... well it’s self explanatory but only paper objects.  So my aim is to conserve and preserve anything paper based.  It’s not officially restoration because I’m not trying to make them look brand new, I’m just trying to stabilise them and preserve them.  So I work on anything from maps, like you’ll hear today, archives, documents, water colours, prints, drawings, to three dimensional card models.  I had the privilege last year of working on one of the original Proclamations which is actually in the exhibition downstairs here as well.  So it’s a varied job and I absolutely love it.So the maps that I’m speaking of today I’ve been conserving a selection of these maps almost every year for I would say maybe nearly ten years and they are the Wide Street Commission plans, all dated from 1757 to 1849, and I would take a selection of these maps per year.  I’ll show you the condition that they come to me in in a few minutes.  I conserve them, then they go back to Dublin City Archives and are placed in secure storage there.  They are also digitised so people can view them.What I’m going to do today is talk about six maps that I’ve very recently treated and they are in very, very poor condition.  Now these are part of another selection of maps but these are probably in the worst condition.  When they come to me they are all rolled up.  They’ve been rolled for years.  You know the oldest I think is 260 years old.So this is an example of how they arrive to me.  So really you can see from the image, if somebody wanted to come in and view that map it really couldn’t be touched.  It couldn’t be opened.  The thing about paper when it’s been rolled for a long time is it wants to stay rolled.  It’s called paper memory.  So even as you try to unroll it, it tends to roll back in and any tears that are present are going to tear further.So this is just before it was treated and it was just very, very gently unrolled for the photograph and it’s held down with weights there and it’s a good example of how they come to me to be treated.So as you can see this map, this is actually of Gloucester Street.  There’s no date on the map but it’s within that time period specified.  It’s extremely discoloured.  Has a lot of surface dirt.  The bottom two sections on the bottom left are actually separated completely from the map, I’ve just placed them beside each other for the photograph.  It’s very, very torn and there are some sections missing which over the years is bound to happen because they are very fragile, they’re being unrolled and rolled and handled and this damage is going to occur to a lot of these maps over the years as they are being used.  So the treatment is very similar to all the maps but it’s cleaned and in this image I have cleaned the left hand side and the right hand side hasn’t been cleaned yet.  So it just shows a good example of the difference between once I start cleaning and it starts to become clear what’s actually underneath all that dirt and it’s a nice process to go through.  It’s a nice process to start with because it’s very visual and you can see the maps cleaning up.  It’s obviously a very delicate process.  The maps are mainly pen and ink and body colour so a lot of those pigments would be sensitive to any kind of treatment or moisture.  In actual fact a lot of the colours have remained really strong on the maps and probably because they have been rolled so they haven’t been exposed to light too much so it’s lovely to see the colours actually brighten up under that dirt as you’re cleaning.So as you can see the cleaning process has started there.  Cleaning basically consists of very small pieces of white eraser and sometimes I would use a smoke sponge which is like a chemical sponge just to very gently lift the dirt off the surface and once all that dry cleaning has been done I then use damp cotton swabs and just swab the surface – I’ll have a few photos of that later – to lift off any kind of soluble dirt.  A lot of objects that I treat I can actually wash in a very large sink I have in my studio which surprises a lot of people but it’s very similar to kind of washing your clothes, the dirt washes out and I check everything beforehand, check nothing is soluble.  A lot of times the pigments don’t wash out and the soluble dirt washes out but these are actually very, very sensitive to moisture so the furthest I can go with wet treatment is just to swab them with cotton swabs and that just very gently lifts the dirt off and actually in this photo this has just been dry cleaned so it hasn’t been swabbed yet so it will actually clean up a little bit more.This is an image of the tear repairs treatment to this map and I suppose a lot of you will have come across archives and documents that have been repaired with Sellotape which is really damaging to paper.  So what I use, what paper conservators use mostly, is Japanese paper to sit over the tears and that is adhered with wheat starch paste which I make up fresh before each treatment and this method is very complementary to paper. I try and pick a Japanese paper of similar weight to the original paper and it has very long fibre so it bonds really nicely and repairs the tears, helps them sit back together, and it’s also, most importantly, all reversible and it doesn’t age badly.  There is no damage going to occur to the paper as it ages as these tear repairs are on the reverse of the paper.So that’s a small corner of tear repairs on the reverse of the map and this is the reverse of the map and all the tear repairs that were done.  You can see on the right hand corner there’s kind of larger pieces, larger strips, of Japanese paper and that was to reattach those two sections that had become separate from the map, so slightly larger just to hold them all together.  And, on the right hand side, I don’ t know if you can see, the large piece of white paper is an infill, sorry there are two pieces of white Japanese paper, so these were the sections that were missing. So what I’ve done is placed a piece of Japanese paper on the reverse, then turned it around and basically trimmed some more Japanese paper to fit exactly into the space that was missing and this makes it much, much stronger.  So there is no danger, if someone picks that map up, of tears going any further in these areas of loss.And then this is the after photo, so this is after treatment, and it’s placed then into a Mylar sleeve.  So this looks like a plastic ... like a poly pocket as such ... it’s actually inert polyester and it actually helps preserve the paper so when they are stored in Dublin City Archives, in their strong room, they are all placed in these Mylar sleeves.  So you can see through the Mylar sleeve to see what’s in it but also the map can be picked up by using the Mylar sleeve so it’s not being handled directly.  So if someone did actually want to see the actual map rather than the digitised image it can be handled without touching it, you can turn it around, see the reverse, see the front and there’s nothing in these sleeves, in these Mylar sleeves, that will cause any damage to paper.  In the normal plastic sleeves there are gases and acids that actually migrate from the sleeves into the paper and will cause them to degrade over time whereas this will actually help preserve it.  So it looks identical to plastic but it’s not, it actually helps preserve it.And then just to sum up, this is the before treatment and then the after treatment in one image.  So you can actually see the bottom left, the two pieces that were separate are still slightly darker than the rest of the map.  They were both cleaned to the same extent but because they were exposed to the air because they were looser they had slightly more ingrained dirt in them.  And also you can see the areas that have been infilled, the areas that were lost.  I’ve left them a neutral off-white colour because again it’s conservation as opposed to restoration, so I’m not trying to hide any areas that were previously lost, you know not trying to make it look new, it’s basically to stabilise it all so that it can be handled and viewed and it’s back in a strong stable condition.  It’s also been pressed after it’s been cleaned and repaired and infilled.  It’s pressed which flattens it out and it can be left pressing for several weeks, if necessary, which removes that memory in the paper of it wanting to roll back up so then it can be stored flat and viewed.  So that was the first map that I treated.The second of six, just in this section, again this is how it came into me, this is before treatment.  So the top is as it was rolled up.  It had been stored rolled up for a long time and this map is of the area of Trinity College and College Green and it’s dated 1784 and there was an inscription on the map "Surveyed by Thomas Sherrard, 1784".  Also on the right hand side, on the front of the map, if you can see in the image, it had a list of each property and who lived in the property.  So very, very useful for researchers I’m sure who are researching this time period and the properties.This is a good example on the image of the reverse, on the lower right you can see someone had attached Sellotape to this map.  Now, it is damaging to paper but at the same time it kept the pieces together so you know they stayed together and then could be treated by me at a later stage, so that was one benefit but if the Sellotape had stayed on the paper it actually can cause it to degrade over time and can cause more damage to the paper bonds and the paper then just becomes more fragile in that area.  Also, as you’ve probably seen in old pieces of Sellotape, on old documents, it discolours very badly and it becomes a very orange/brown colour on paper and that becomes ingrained in the paper and it’s really, really difficult, almost impossible, to remove that staining.  So just a word of warning which you probably all know already, don’t use Sellotape on anything important.So the treatment of this map; this is the swabbing, damp swabbing, and you can just see the dirt that’s come off the map onto that cotton swab.  It’s not a very nice picture but necessary.  So before the swabbing this again was dry cleaned, surface cleaned, with various types of erasers and sponges to remove the surface dirt from the surface of the paper.  After that it was treated with water and damp cotton swabs to lift off the remaining soluble dirt on the paper and then tear repairs – this is the reverse of the paper – and you can again see the Japanese paper tear repairs that have all been cut or torn to size to fit over the tears exactly and the damaged section on the right hand side of this image has slightly thicker Japanese paper just to hold it all together.  And then this is the before and after.  In the before picture, which I forgot to mention actually, you can see the right hand side of the map has very, very heavy surface dirt and again that was the end that was exposed when it was rolled up, so that tended to get dirtier than the rest.  The rest was slightly protected by the fact that it was rolled.  But the very, very heavy ingrained dirt all settles on the exposed piece which was on right hand side.  So it cleaned up really nicely.  I think particularly the lower part of the image where you couldn’t really see the streets as well have cleaned up so it can be viewed and examined.  The areas that were missing have been infilled, tears repaired and again this was pressed and it then went into the Mylar sleeve for storage in Dublin City Archives and would be photographed as well so it could be viewed digitally.  So that was the second map.This is the third map that I treated.  So the one advantage of this map, if you could call it that, was it didn’t have as much surface dirt as the previous maps but you can see it was very, very badly torn – really, really fragile.  Even unrolling it to view it, when I first picked them up, was very difficult.  This is a map of Townsend Street from 1802.  An inscription on the reverse read ‘Fleet Market, year 1802’ as a description of the map and also on this map, on the right hand side you can see on the image of the front was a list of the properties and their prices so again probably very valuable to someone researching this area.  But as it was before treatment it couldn’t be handled at all.  In fact, the tears running into the centre, if they tore any further it would have been in even more separate sections than it was already.  The image of the front on the lower left, you can see the top left and the left side, both sections had separated completely.  They were separate from the main piece of the map and, as you can see, there are a huge amount of large tears running into the centre of the map – so very, very fragile.  So again this was very gently relaxed out so I could get to work on it and then it was surface cleaned on the front and the reverse using different techniques, so all the surface dirt was removed, apart from the very ingrained dirt, and then the tears were repaired – similar to the previous maps.  These tears were quite extensive so I did some work on the lightbox for some of this map and the lightbox really just allows me to see through the map, so if tears on a piece of paper are very old they tend to not line up very well together so to ensure that I was lining up every line or inscription or drawing on the map the lightbox allows me to see through it and I can very gently line everything up to the way that it should be and the picture on the right is the wheat starch paste that I make up to use as an adhesive with the Japanese paper.  A lot of techniques in paper conservation come from Japan because that’s where it originated so you’ve heard me talk about Japanese paper, the wheat starch paste is Japanese, the brushes I use are Japanese.  They really are the masters of paper conservation so conservators in the rest of the world would tend to follow their techniques, you know they are absolute perfectionists so great conservators to follow.  So that was the tear repairs, letting them settle.Again, another image of tear repairs drying.  So the picture on the left is because some of these tears are so long and they’ve been torn for so long as well they needed to pressed gently so they have been repaired on the reverse and then these weights are placed on top of them just to ensure that they flatten down nicely and line up together nicely and then the image on the right is all the tear repairs and the infills on the reverse of this map.  You can see the Japanese paper extends out beyond the original border of the map, so this is very much during treatment.  These repairs are then trimmed at the edges but just to ensure it is only the Japanese paper that’s trimmed, it’s never the original paper of the map (laughter).  You know we keep every single ... as you can see from that image on the left hand side, that’s before it has been trimmed, every small little piece that’s sticking out is kept just to ensure I am keeping every original section of the map.  So the Japanese paper is then trimmed at the edges and then each map is pressed, as I’ve mentioned previously, and another Japanese technique is used for this.  We use a dahlia sprayer which is just a very, very light mist.  We mist and humidify the paper and just let it very gently relax out then it’s placed between boards and weights are placed on top of it and it can press anything from a day to a few weeks just to flatten it all out nicely and, as I mentioned, remove that paper memory so it doesn’t want to roll back up.  So this is the before and after images and you can see where it’s been infilled.  Again, I haven’t tried to hide these areas but it’s all back in a stable condition.  All the tears have been repaired.  It’s back as one piece and again any treatments that were used will help preserve it.  None of these treatments will actually damage the paper, so then it went back to Dublin City Archives in this condition.The next one is a map of Fleet Street and Bank of Ireland.  No I don’t have any exact date on this one but this is as it was before treatment.  This one, unlike the previous ones, has very bad mould damage so at some stage this had come in contact with moisture and a damp atmosphere and it had a lot of mould on it.  So I don’t know if you can see, there’s kind of dark spots running across the lower centre, these are all mould spots, so if this had been left without treatment the mould can eventually just eat into the pigments and the paper and can cause literally holes to occur in the paper.  It literally eats right through it so it was very important, as well as cleaning and repairing, to remove all the mould spores from this map.  So it was surface cleaned very, very gently because it was very soft because of the moisture damage so the surface of this map was a lot softer than the previous maps, as with them all, but a little bit extra, I had to treat it very, very gently when surface cleaning to ensure that I wasn’t removing any of the pigments or affecting the surface of the paper.  So it was very gently surface cleaned and then once I’d ensured it was cleaned and all the mould had been removed it was, again, repaired with Japanese paper.  The areas of loss were infilled.  So this is an image of the front and the reverse during the tear repair and infill treatment and then this is it after treatment.  Again, it was pressed once it had been cleaned and repaired and stabilised.  So you can see the difference between before and after, that it’s nice and flat.  You can still see the staining that was left, that was caused by the mould damage, that was ingrained right through from front to back of the paper, so I went as far as I could with treatment but obviously I don’t want to damage the paper at all but most importantly all the mould spores were completely removed and the fact that this was going back into a dry stable environment where the temperature is being monitored would help ensure that no other mould spores were going to grow and no further damage was going to occur.  The paper was still quite soft so it still has to be handled very carefully.  But, again, it was placed in a Mylar sleeve so it doesn’t need to be touched or handled directly.  It would be protected in the Mylar sleeve in Dublin City Archives when people need to view it.And this is a fifth map that I treated in this section and this is Hawkins Street, Townsend Street, from 1800.  Again, this is by Thomas Sherrard.  The inscription on the lower right, on the front ‘by Thomas Sherrard, 1800’ and this slightly differed from the others in that it was paper attached to canvas with edge tapes around it and you can see the reverse was extremely dirty – very, very heavy surface dirt.  And again, much heavier surface dirt in the section that was rolled to the outside and was exposed to the air.  So the thing about canvas backings is that they attract a huge amount of dirt to the paper because of the open structure of the canvas, so it’s usually unless it’s of inherent importance to the paper it’s usually removed as a way of getting to the back and then the backing is replaced with a paper backing which doesn’t attract as much dirt and the edge tapes were removed.  In fact, they were almost falling off it anyway, they had all become loose as well.  And another interesting thing about this is you can see hopefully the holes in it, this wasn’t insect damage, it just seems it was poor handling at some stage.  I don’t know what was done to it but all these large holes running through it occurred at some stage or other during its lifetime, so these were causing it to be generally weak as well – the structure of the paper wasn’t as strong because of these holes.  So again this was surface cleaned and this is just an image of during treatment, so the right hand side has been cleaned.  The left hand side still has the surface dirt on it, so you can see that it was cleaning up nicely and it cleaned up very well.  So the top images are the before treatment and the bottom images are the after treatment.  So one aspect of the canvas backing was it had one inscription on it, so I cleaned that and kept it so it’s stored with the map, the inscription reads ‘Dublin Society Maps, 140 Fleet Market, year ...’ – the year has degraded off it so the  year is not on it but we know it’s 1800.  So that inscription from the canvas is retained with the map and in actual fact the original canvas backing was handed back to Ellen in the Archives in case they wanted to keep it with the original map and the edge tapes were also handed back.  So again this was cleaned, repaired, the holes were infilled which you can see from the image on the left – they are slightly lighter than the original paper.  It was pressed to flatten it and it was lined with a full sheet of Japanese paper, so this replaces the canvass that was on it and it’s a nice clean way of strengthening the paper as opposed to the original canvas.  So it was handed back in a nice clean re-lined condition.The final map which I’ll speak about is ... this is quite a long map.  It was 900mm – 90cm long and this is of Sackville, Gardiner, Temple Street, Summerhill area and an inscription on the reverse read ‘Summerhill’.  This was quite unusual in that it consisted of layers of paper attached to together.  There is maybe 3-4 layers of paper and I’m presuming this was done originally but it’s quite hard to tell.  So I didn’t want to remove any of the layers but a lot of them were delaminating and sections were missing.  So once it had been cleaned, which again was quite a tough job because it was very, very heavy surface dirt and this is an image of the cleaning.  So the top left is a cleaning test patch, so this is me initially just cleaning to see how much dirt is going to come off and you could actually see through the grey dirt a nice green and red colour coming through so I knew it would clean up quite nicely.  The bottom image is the reverse of the map and this is the second cleaning process which is swabbing with damp swabs where I just place a piece of blotter beneath the sections, swab it, and you can see the dirt that’s come off onto the blotter and the swab and the blotter underneath the map.  I was just very, very soluble dirt coming off this map so it was quite a long process to remove all the dirt from this map and then, as I said, there were layers of paper so I wanted to re-attach all those layers back together so it was a matter of lifting some sections that were loose and pasting with wheat starch paste through the layers from front to back before then executing the tear repairs which you can see on the reverse in this image and also one area of infill to strengthen up the map.  I didn’t infill the pieces that are missing at the top and bottom edge because the paper was very, very heavy and there was nothing to attach the infill to so I left them as they were.  So again, this is the before and after images.  So you can see how heavy that surface dirt was on that map.  It was really discoloured – very, very hard to see and it cleaned up very, very nicely.  I would have liked to have gotten it cleaner but that was as far as I could go with the treatment but, again, all the images are visible, all the inscriptions are visible, so it could be examined.  As with the other maps, it was also pressed to flatten it and then placed in the Mylar sleeve for storage and they all were obviously stored flat as opposed to rolled so that no further damage would occur.  So that’s the final map I’m going to talk about.Just as a little segueway, something which made this job a little bit more exciting was that the RTÉ show Nationwide contacted me to ask could they film me working, whatever project I had coming up or something I found interesting, so I suggested this project and contacted Ellen and Mary in the Archive and checked it was okay with them and they very kindly agreed that Nationwide could film the process of the conservation of these maps.  So it was a little bit of added pressure but (laughter) it was also exciting I suppose to work along the way and Ellen was brilliant, she filmed with me when I was picking the maps up and dropping them off and did some interviews.  You can see her in the top right corner there.  And they also came out to the studio during the process and filmed me working on some of the maps as well so that made it more exciting even though I thoroughly enjoy working on them anyway but it was a little bit added extra.So that’s basically the process from start to finish.  You know, as I said, I work on several of these most years and it’s a job I really enjoy doing, particularly I think being originally from Dublin, living in Wicklow now also.  But being originally from Dublin it’s interesting to see the maps and how the streets were planned and it’s interesting or it’s a privilege I suppose to be able to help make them stable and secure and accessible as well.  So I will leave it at that, thanks for listening. (Applause) 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.

The following is a transcript of Restoration of No. 19 North Great George's Street, a talk by Harold Clarke.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Harold Clarke gives a charming account of restoring the beautiful Georgian building, number 19 North Great George's Street. Hear about the challenges Harold faced during his faithful restoration of the house and the delightful features he uncovered, most particularly its beautiful decorative plasterwork. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 as part of the Dublin City Archives' Heritage Week programme. My boarding school was one of the Georgian distinguished buildings in Dublin and my university had a collection of the best Georgian buildings in Dublin.  Not that Georgian necessarily means comfort (laughter).  I would give my school probably 3½ out of 10.  I would give my university perhaps 5 out of 10.  After college I went to live in a Regency villa in Killiney, called Ballinclea House, which had been built by a branch of the Talbot family of Malahide, the Power Talbots, and the neighbours would tell me that the most distinguished thing that happened in the house was that King George and Queen Mary stopped for afternoon tea there on their way from Leopardstown.  So it’s not surprising with that background that I thought of living in a Georgian house when it came to the period in life when I would have a house of my own.  So one day at lunch time I was walking through Easons, as one does, and I met my friend Brian Molloy – also from Roscommon.  Brian knew everything about Georgian Dublin.  He had his ear close to the ground.  He knew what houses were available, who lived in them, etc.  So he told me that a house in North Great George’s Street – which I had never heard of before – had become available and he thought that I might find it possible to buy it.So there and then we went to see it, No. 19.  That’s a later photograph of it.  It was slightly more derelict looking when I went that day.  It had a dangerous building order on it.  In that time all the doors in North Great George’s Street were open which was the sign of a tenement street.  It was beginning to show 180 years of dereliction but there were good things about it, there were no tenants and it was a lovely house.  The bowed back was a particular feature of the house where the house projected beyond its neighbours.  That’s as it was in 1967.  The roof was pretty dangerous and that had to be replaced.  Within the house the only lavatory in the building was on the second floor and in due course it had leaked over the years and brought down the drawing room ceiling underneath.  The partitions divided up each room in the house and each separate apartment had its own coal box on the landings.  The top floor was pretty wet except that there were so many layers of linoleum that the water didn’t seep through so that protected it.  That was a view of the drawing room on the first floor.  Another view of the drawing room.  And that was the front hall.  The front hall interestingly had two pictures which were probably almost as valuable as the house and the lady who sold me the house left me the pictures.  They were two dog paintings by George Armfield and they were still there at the end of my day in the house.After 3 days I purchased the house, thanks to the Bank of Ireland who lent me the money and that was about it.  I hate to say it in this room but Dublin Corporation told me that they couldn’t see their way to giving me a grant because "the house wasn’t suitable for the housing of the working classes", to use their wording.  I did get a grant of £140 from the Department of Local Government.  Fortunately, I had among my friends a sensitive architect called Austin Dunphy who came to inspect the house and he gave the all-clear that I could develop the house.  One of the biggest jobs in the building was scraping back the plaster ceilings.  As you can see there, that’s a frieze in the dining room which is completely coated with years and years and years of white wash, so all we could do... probably now, one could remove that chemically but all one could do at that time was to scrape it back – as was the fact with the ceilings on the drawing room floors where they were quite decorated ceilings.I was very fortunate that great groups of my friends would come along each weekend and help me with this work of scraping back the ceilings and we had work parties – that’s a tea break in one of the work parties.  Interestingly, in that photograph you see where the outline of the original mantelpiece was which had been replaced by the Victorians with a marble mantelpiece.  Other views of scraping the ceiling – Desiree Shortt, Peter Munro and myself.  That is the dome at the top of the staircase.  In 19 North Great George’s Street the staircase runs parallel to the street, in other words its right angles to the inner hall – to the front hall – and it was quite a job.  We had to lift up the dome and reseat it and it was one of the major jobs and one of the first jobs to keep the rain out of that part of the building.  That’s the drawing room as completed because, so far as possible, I went for the original colours and when we took down all the layers of wallpaper we discovered that sort of grass green on the walls and green and pink on the ceilings so we were able to copy that and you get a view of the ceiling there that I’ll talk about in a moment.It was a fairly lonely job discovering about the history of the house.  Con Curran, C.P. Curran’s Dublin Decorative Plasterwork was published the year before I bought the house but there is no mention in his book of 19 North Great George’s Street. I think of Con Curran when I hear Daniel O’Donnell on the radio in his adverts saying ‘most people like my music, the rest don’t know what they’ve missed’ (laughter).  Con Curran liked Georgian ceilings but he didn’t know about No. 19.  The gap in information has since been replaced by Conor Lucey’s magisterial book on Michael Stapleton and of course on the Penguin guide, so it’s much easier to get information now.And I’m going to quote from Conor Lucey’s book because it expresses better than I can in my own words what was discovered about the creation of the house and the decoration.  He says:“In March 1787 John Prendergast, a bricklayer, in partnership with Edward Archdall took leave on the sites (that’s of 19 and 20 North Great George’s Street).  Work was completed in 1789.  Brian Bolger, a contemporary Dublin Quantity Surveyor in 1790 measured the two drawing room ceilings for painting, including the picking out in fancy colours (as you see) at 19 following the decoration of the house by Stapleton.”He goes on:“Of the two houses (19 and 20), No. 19 is unquestionably the more elegantly detailed and was described as ‘in the occupation of Edward Archdall’ in 1790.  Built on a narrow plot of some 20 feet in width, the building has a central stairwell lit by a large decorated oval skylight.  Drawings in the Stapleton Collection correspond to the executed plasterwork on the two first floor ceilings and represent Stapleton’s interpretation of the Wyattesque ornamental style.  The ceiling of the rear drawing room is the more accomplished design, featuring two attenuated lozenge shapes, one positioned inside the other and enriched with foliated wreaths similar to a design by Wyatt dated 1776 for Milton Abbey in Dorset and executed by Joseph Rose.  Although the central rosette is small in scale, there is a pleasing balance to the composition as a whole.  The frieze in this room featuring hounds, crescent moons and quivers is also found in the Diana drawing room at Belvedere House (up the street).  In the rear first floor room of 45 Merrion Square, built by Gustavus Hume in 1785, and in the small front and rear first floor rooms of No. 11 Parnell Square.  Additional drawings for the plasterwork of No. 19 North Great George’s Street include a full scale working drawing for a frieze inscribed ‘Ceiling Line’ similar to that executed throughout the entire stair hall and another frieze design featuring Putti holding laurel swags executed in the dining room on the ground floor.”The dining room had this frieze but it had no decorated ceiling which is interesting but it had a lovely sideboard alcove which I think was probably my favourite piece of plaster decoration in the house.  It was decorated with a motif of corn and grapes. That’s another picture of the drawing room.  That’s the sideboard alcove as it originally was in the dining room.  I used that alcove quite a lot.  My booklet which Ellen referred to on Georgian Dublin, I discovered there was no simple, cheap booklet on Georgian Dublin when I restored the house so I wrote this one which went through a couple of editions and I used that cover on one of the editions.  Interestingly the series, the Irish Heritage series, went on to become about 74 titles in the series including 7 on Dublin buildings and Dublin interests including Joyce’s Dublin and one on this building, the City Hall.  I must have had some foresight also because I did a booklet on St Patrick’s College Maynooth and the Pontifical Irish College in Rome (laughter).Residents in the street: we did some research.  Sir Samuel Ferguson lived next door to us.  Had lived next door to us in No. 20.  Isaac Butt, the leader of the Irish Party, lived in the street. Mahaffy of course lived in No. 38.  Arthur Guinness was in No. 43 when he was Butler for the Archbishop of Cashel.  And in my house, Mr Archdall is mentioned in the Lucey reference there was the original resident but shortly thereafter the house was inhabited by the Kings of County Roscommon.  The Kings were a quite extraordinarily acquisitive family in North Roscommon.  They dated back to 1603 when the town of Boyle was granted to Sir John King and after that they spread across the county to the wonderful Rockingham House near Boyle, the Nash designed house – sadly destroyed by fire later, that was the King Hammonds, to Kilronan Castle where the King Tenisons lived.  The King house in Boyle itself and my family of Kings came from a house called Charlestown in the village of Jamestown which was on the border of Roscommon and Leitrim.In the 60s and 70s there was a great character in Dublin known as the ‘Pope’ O’Mahony.  I never heard any other Christian name for him, he was always known as the ‘Pope’ but the ‘Pope’ knew everything about every Anglo Irish family that ever was and when I told him I had bought a house which had been owned by the Kings he said “Oh the Kings could travel from their house in Kilronan Castle to their estate in Mitchelstown in Cork without ever taking their eyes of King's land” (laughter), a little of an exaggeration I think but you get the message.Next to the Kings was a very interesting family, the Curtis family.  The Curtis father was a lawyer but his son is the interesting one, Robert Curtis.  Robert was the first Catholic scholar in Trinity College.  Being a scholar in Trinity College is probably you know, something you do after you are in college for some time and you sit the exam and it is announced on Trinity Monday if you have achieved the scholarship.  If you become a scholar you get some nonsensical rewards like playing marbles on the chapel steps (laughter) but you also get practical things like free tuition, free commons, free rooms, for the rest of your time in Trinity, so young Robert Curtis was a fairly privileged young man.  After Trinity he joined the Society of Jesus.  He was never ordained for health reasons but the interesting thing about his life was that he became a great and good friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins who had recently been appointed to the new university in Dublin.  He came to Dublin in 1884.  Hopkins hated Dublin.  He found it ‘a cheerless place’ he said.  But he writes to his mother about ‘his rock’ as he called the Curtis family and he wrote about the pleasure and the generosity he received from the Curtis’s in their house in Dublin.  He died of Typhoid five years after he arrived in Dublin and is buried in the Jesuit plot in Glasnevin alongside Robert Curtis. After the Curtis came the Price family who were China dealers in South Great George’s Street.  After them it was a hotel for 10 years and after that a tenement.  Interesting to look at the history of the house, the landed gentry had it first, then the professional class, then the trading class, then a hotel.One of the great pleasures of living in the street was getting to know my neighbours, the neighbours who had lived there, and also the new residents who came shortly after me to restore the houses, people like Desiree Shortt, Willie and Ann Dillon, David Murray, Brendan and Josephine O’Connell – almost all of whom are there still keeping the flag flying in North Great George’s Street, so I am afraid I am the one who abandoned it.Some of the events in North Great George’s Street: the first was an unhappy one – in 1974 the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in Parnell Street.  I was on my way home from work and missed the bomb by a matter of seconds. I came into the street to a deathly silence which followed the bomb before people realised what carnage and what destruction had been done.  I went up to the house to find ... as I was saying earlier the bow of the house projected further than its neighbours so I went up to the house to find that all the windows in the back of the house had been blown in so we were having some people for dinner that night so the first thing was to clear up all the glass which was everywhere and closed the shutters and lived with the closed shutters for several months thereafter.  Interestingly, among our guests that night were John and Delphine Kelly, my friends.  John at the time was Attorney General so our dinner party was delayed because there was a Cabinet meeting – an emergency Cabinet meeting in the early evening – but we got down to dinner eventually.Next door to me on the north side was No. 18 which had been restored by Conor and Nuala Griffin and in due course they decided to put it on the market and it got not one bid at the auction, so I decided to save it I would buy the house and the Bank of Ireland came to my rescue again and lent me the money and I held it until somebody would come along to buy it and that somebody was a lecturer in English in Trinity College called David Norris and in his autobiography he tells a story of coming along to inspect the house and he said it was ‘love at first sight’ - that was the house not me.  (laughter)  He moved in at the end of 1978 and brought his dynamism to the street.  In 1979 the North Great George’s Street Preservation Society was founded and David was extremely active in that way and in all sorts of ways, including the restoration of No. 35 as the James Joyce Centre.I’ll show you ... oh I was going to show you that which was also the dining room alcove which the auctioneers used as the front, on the cover, for the auction when our contents were sold.  That is the alcove in the dining room when we were living there. That is the garden – half the original garden.  It was fairly derelict and it required a lot of work.  In the 1970s the Metropole Cinema and Ballroom was demolished to make way for British Home Stores which then became Penneys and in the demolition they took down on the first floor level, between the windows, there was a lion’s mask – a carved granite lion’s mask between each window – and a colleague of mine and myself persuaded the demolishers to give us the lion’s mask, not to put them in the dump truck and he brought his home to Drumcondra where he put it into his garden, where I’m sure it surprises people to this day and I brought mine home and built it into the wall of the garden – the wall next to David Norris.  I can’t remember the name of the carver, it’s the man who did a lot of the carvings in O’Connell Street.In 1987 it was the 200th anniversary of the granting of the lease to the house on 15 March 1987 and I gave the house a birthday party on that day and as a present I got the wrought iron gates in the garden made for the garden.Some further views in the house; that was the library, as we called it, which is the front drawing room.  The bookcase, as you can see, has a frieze over it which came from a house in County Limerick called Kilballyowen.  Kilballyowen was famous for a horse that had been bred there.  They had this huge library with an enormous frieze and a friend of mine who lived in a house called Lough Cutra in County Galway, in Gort, and I, we split the frieze.  A sort of decision of Solomon.  And the frieze is still in Lough Cutra and it is also still in North Great George’s Street so far as I know.  That’s the detail of the frieze.  I’m not sure whose plasterwork it was but he was obviously a man of some skill.  The photograph is taken from a magazine article about the house.  That’s another view of the library.  And that is the library ceiling which I painted in Dublin colours.  That’s the inner hall.  The stair carpet I left when I sold the house and I’m sure it’s still there.  That’s another view of the inner hall.  In the house, when finished, there was the Garden Room which is shown there and the old kitchen in the front also in the basement and a toilet also in the basement.  On the main floor was the kitchen, just inside the hall door, and the dining room.  The two drawing rooms on the first floor.  Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor.  Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor.  One of the reasons why I’m showing you this is you see the alcove, there is a frieze over it and that also came from the demolition of the Capitol and the Metropole.  In the Capitol Cinema that was an over door, over the door into the main cinema and it was the other way up, so I put it into ... in fact there were two alcoves, I put them into the alcoves upside down as it were.  That’s another view of the Garden Room which was really a sort of sculpture gallery with a view out to the garden.Coming towards the end.  That’s the staircase, it’s 100 steps, we’re on the way down now.  The steps from the ground floor to the basement were granite but the other steps were very untiring which was one of the things about Georgian buildings, the steps and the stairs are always just about the right height that in fact you can walk up to the top of the house and not be exhausted (laughter).So on our way out there is the George Armfield, one of the two George Armfield paintings still there, as it was when I bought the house.  Over the inner door under layers and layers and layers of paint I discovered in the centre a pattern of two griffons made of either silver or pewter.  I had to restore them very carefully but I’m sure they are still there to be seen.So in conclusion, it was a great pleasure living in North Great George’s Street.  Being within seven minutes walk of work was pretty good and the feeling of being part of a community on a mission.  So some people, many people, say to me ‘Why did you leave it?’, I found it hard to articulate it.  It was a mission complete.  It was a very large house for two people and it was probably time for me to move on and do other things which I did.  I moved to an apartment for a number of years and then when I retired from full-time work I bought a hillside site of 3½ acres in County Wicklow where I created a garden, which in fact is open this week for Heritage Week, each morning, in aid of  my friend Andrew McElroy’s project in South India, in Tamil Nadu and I open the garden each year during the summer for him, as it were.  The views of the garden ... the deer are not real (laughter), they are bronze or something, and that’s the bridge over a pond in the garden and that’s the Japanese garden.So I’m there in County Wicklow in Avoca for 21 years now and perhaps time I moved on to some other project.  I was in North Great George’s Street for almost 20 years.  So some of my friends are inconsiderate enough to say that at age 83 there aren’t many options left open (laughter) but we’ll see.  I want to say thank you for Ellen for assisting me and for dealing with my slides and all the other bits and pieces which she digitised for me.Ellen: Thank you so much Harold for your wonderful talk and I’m sure we’d all agree that the before and after pictures are just absolutely stunning and they show how huge an undertaking it was.Harold: Thank you very much Ellen.  (Applause) 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.

Listen to Harold Clarke's charming account of restoring the beautiful Georgian building, no. 19 North Great George's Street.

The following is the transcript of a talk given by Dublin City Council Historian in Residence Dr. Mary Muldowney and historian Catherine Holmes. It tells the story of the bombing of North Strand on the night of 30/31 May 1941. This special event which marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing was hosted by Charleville Mall Library on 31 May 2021.

The following is the transcript of a discussion on global climate action and the food we eat. What we eat, how we eat, and where we’re getting our food from can have a big impact on the environment.

The following is the transcript of a talk given by Mary Muldowney in Cabra Library on 25 August 2016.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Mary Muldowney looks at the lives of Dubliners who worked for the Great Southern and Western Railway in the early years of the 21st century. At the time the Great Southern and Western Railway was the largest railway system in Ireland and it was a significant employer in Dublin.  Mary looks at working conditions, pay, pension and industrial action, focusing especially on the lives of those who were engaged at the lower levels of the pay scales, men and women who were completely dependent on the railways.Recorded in front of a live audience at Cabra Library on the 25 August 2016 as part of the Libraries' Heritage Week Programme.In 1990 John O’Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger wrote a guide book and it was entitled ‘The Sunny side of Ireland:  How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway’.  It was published by Thom’s Directories but it is likely that the Great Southern Railway – and I’m going to call them just the Great Southern for convenience – had had a hand in the commission.  The style reads almost like an advertisement brochure as you can see from the extract.The carriages which the company provide are of the very latest design – vestibule corridor, trains with dining and breakfast cars, run daily and the speed of the trains will bear comparison with any.  The journey Dublin to Cork 165 miles is performed in 4 hours which is not all that much slower than sometimes it takes now.  (laughs)  To Killarney 189 miles and about 15 minutes more and all the important tourist centres can be reached within a very short time.  Comfort of passages is well arranged for.  Refreshment rooms are provided at the principle stations and breakfast, luncheon and tea baskets can always be had as well as pillows, rugs and all the modern conveniences of travel.  Besides all this the enterprise of the company have provided at Killarney, Parknasilla, Kenmare, Carragh Lake and Waterville hotels which for appearance and luxury, tempered by economy, are the equals of any in Europe.Now the book follows various routes covered by the Great Southern and it outlines many of the sights that can be seen if you take the railway excursions and the brief forays into local history and there are lots of really attractive illustrations.But as is the case for such guide books it makes absolutely no reference at all to the people who worked on the railways to provide the excellent service.  The smooth travelling and the wide range of amenities are also outlined in great detail, again with no reference to those who deliver it.  So in this talk I’m going to focus on some aspects of the lives of those people who were engaged at the lowest levels of the pay scales, who were completely dependent on the railways for their livelihood at a time of significant economic, political and social upheaval.Now the Great Southern had the largest railway network in Ireland.  It began in 1844 as a railway that would connect Dublin with Cashel and it was incorporated the following year.  The lines afterwards extended to the city of Cork and various other amalgamations took place in the second half of the 19th century so that by the end of the century the company’s rail network covered a significant area of what is now the Republic and they were a pretty powerful organisation.  They were typical of other companies in the railway industry in employing a predominantly male workforce.  Women’s employment was confined to catering and cleaning for the most part and that would have been cleaning carriages and the dormitories of drivers.  Locomotive cleaning was confined to young boys who would be apprentice locomotive drivers eventually.So women were starting to be hired for clerical work at this time and we’ll say a bit more about this later.  But as technology advanced in the early decades of the 20th century typewriters and telephone exchange started to become an integral part of systems like railway networks and it was mainly women who were employed to operate them.  Now, according to the 1901 Census the number of women working in the Irish railway industry and related commercial operations was very low indeed.  You can see you have a total of more than 11,500 workers only 96 were women and it hadn’t changed all that much by 1911.  But although there were now 143 females, some of those would have been working in the hotels that were mentioned in the guide book and the number of men had increased but as a proportion of the total workforce the male workers had decreased every so slightly if not really significantly.Jobs on the railways were very much prized at the time.  Even in the lower paid grades such as permanent weigh men and crossing gate keepers and they were generally secure and quite often they came with accommodation provided.  Railway houses were of mixed quality and they usually had to be surrendered when the worker retired.  The rationale for this was that wages were considered by the railway companies to be high enough for employees to save for their old age.  This policy, however, often resulted in workers – particularly in rural areas – holding on to their jobs until they were very old or even dying in service in order not to lose their homes. The Census returns in both 1901 and 1911 show that the accommodation was frequently of a very poor standard, particularly the cottages associated with crossing gates.  This was not necessarily because they had been built to a poor standard but simply that many of the buildings were getting on in age at this stage – they were 40-50 years old – and while they had been built to a good standard maintenance wasn’t very high.  So the houses built around the Great Southern Railway networks, particularly the works in Inchicore, are a good example of the kinds of accommodation provided for workers.  The houses there were of a very good basic standard.  They weren’t luxurious but the tendency to large families could be problematic.  Now I was looking at the square which was built for a lot of the fitters and others who were sort of the skilled workers in the railway works in Inchicore at the time and the Sadlier family were fairly typical in that you can see that there were several members of the family at adult level still living in a house that had 5 rooms.  It was classified as a second class house by the Census but this simply meant that it had a roof and windows and a front door and it was fairly solid in that it was brick built.  It wasn’t likely to blow down.  But it didn’t necessarily mean that there was anything wonderful about it.  There were seven members of the family present on Census night in both 1901 and 1911.  As I said, they are nearly all adults as you can see in the third column there and their ages.  So there wouldn’t have been a lot of space available.  And the one thing that was innovative still at that point of building around the houses was that green spaces tended to be included in the planning so the square and other similar developments, like the Great Western houses in Phibsborough, they would have all had a green space or park built in as an integral part of the development.  The residents of this house, 16 Great Western Square, were also ... that was for the Midland in general, the Midland and Great Western Railway (laughs), and they operated out of Broadstone where the Great Southern operated mainly out of King’s Bridge, what’s now Heuston.  But again the houses were of a good standard but the problem was that the families tended to be fairly large.  Now, if you’re looking at this one which is from 1911 the Brown family, several of the adult children are described as working as ‘clerks’ and because it was very common for railway companies to employ family members, they were particularly keen to have people who could be vouched for by existing workers, it’s quite likely that they were railway clerks but I can’t swear to it.  But certainly the father was a railway guard and he had originally in the 1901 Census the family had been living in Clifden where he was also a railway guard and at that time for the Midland and Great Western too.  He may simply have transferred to Dublin because he had been born there and there would have been more opportunity for the children as they grew older.Now despite the company’s claim that workers were well paid enough to allow them to save for their old age, in 1900 the Great Southern implemented a non contributory pension scheme, following the example of the industry in Britain, and it was aimed for people who were very much on the lowest pay grades because I imagine you know underneath all of the claims about adequate preparation for old age was an awareness that the wages were pretty low.  So the introduction of the free pension in 1900, as it was called because it was non contributory, was welcomed and there was quite a number of pensions immediately qualified.  But in 1908 the state pension, old age pension, was announced and the Great Southern immediately decided that they would cut the occupational pension.  They were just going to take it away.So they issued in October 1908 as the Old Age Pension Act had been made law they issued this notice, it was signed by Francis Ormsby who was the Company Secretary at the time.  So the heading was ‘Free pensions to servants on the wages staff of the company’.  As I say when free pensions to the wage earning staff of the company were sanctioned in the circular 17th of February 1900 the directors reserved to themselves the right to alter or terminate the arrangements then made as per following paragraph.  And he quoted:As the allowances to be granted by the company will be provided out of their own funds without contributions from the men, the directors reserved to themselves the right of declining, withdrawing or reducing an allowance in any case as also the power of altering or terminating the arrangement at any time and as they may deem necessary.  The recent provision of old Age pensions by the Government charged in the general taxes to which the company and their shareholders both as a corporation and its individuals or large contributors has materially modified the position of men in advanced years and the directors give notice that they hereby terminate the free pension scheme hitherto enforce from 1st of January 1919.  This notice does not affect those to whom pensions are at present being paid.But actually of course it did because if you’re getting the occupational pension and you get this thing out of the blue saying that if you qualify for a state old age pension we’re taking away your occupational pensions it would have come as quite a shock to a lot of the older people.Now, William Partridge was the representative for the ITGWU, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in the Inchicore works and he wrote to the Irish Independent and it was really drawing attention to the fact that existing pension holders, that claim that they wouldn’t be affected was actually just exactly what (laughs) you know ... to put mildly it couldn’t stand up.  So he clarified the position from the men’s point of view and just there’s a quote and extract from his rather long letter, that:Upon the publication of the recent order of the Board relative to the stoppage of old age pensions after January next a petition was drafted seeking a modification of that order in so far as not to apply to men having 30 years and upwards.  The object of this petition was to safeguard the interest of old and faithful servants who had devoted the best years of their lives to the service of the company and who, for the past 8 years, had been schooled to regard the reception of the free pension as a certainty in the future.  To such men the recent order of the board was cruel in the extreme and the petition presented upon their behalf was signed by 860 adult employees engaged at the Inchicore works.  Of that number no less than 700 possessed only 29 years service and under and therefore would not be eligible to gain anything by the granting of the rest.  In other words it was entirely altruistic on their part to be getting involved in this.  The remaining 160 had a service of 30 years and upwards and if they lived and were fortunate in their services to qualify for the pension provided the directors were so kind as to favour the considered petition presented upon their behalf.Now, given that Partridge was a very active trade union official and in them days you got involved in other Republican activity I suspect the tone was rather tongue in cheek.  But a lot of letters at that point were written in these very humble terms.Now, he said that the very day we were officially informed that the order of the board relative to the stoppage of the payment of free pensions must stand but that the directors would be prepared to consider individual applications upon their merits.  This promise carries no guarantees that a pension will be granted.  Thus the door is not slammed it is shut gently but nevertheless closed tightly leaving not one ray of hope for those whose lives were given in the service of the company and now in their old age are disappointed.  The board just ignored the petition essentially and department heads were told to compile lists of the pensions who had previously worked in their areas and to give details of their dates of birth.  This was to ensure that the company would be aware of every worker who was over 70 years of age and thus entitled to the state old age pension.Now, in December 1908 Ormsby wrote again to all the pensions who had been identified by the department heads and he sent them this circular letter.Sir,Under the Old Age Pension Act which comes into operation on the 1st of January 1909 every person aged 70 and upwards whose yearly income does not exceed 31 pound 10 shillings per annum is entitled to an Old Age Pension from the Government at the rate mentioned in the schedule of the Act.  As the company will have to contribute to these Government pensions as rate payers they cannot continue to pay the company’s existing pensions in full and I am directed to say that you should immediately make application for an Old Age Pension from the Government and as soon as you report to me that you have obtained such the board will then consider the question of supplementing the weekly payment which you may receive from the Government.  The company will only continue the present pension to you up to the 1st of March 1909 but not after that date and you should therefore take steps at once to secure whatever weekly sum you are entitled to from the Government.  Forms of application for Government pensions can be obtained at your local post office.Now, the state Old Age Pension at this point was a maximum of 5 shillings a week so we’re not talking huge amounts of money, even for the time and although the cost of living would have been rather less than it is now it was still a pretty paltry amount and a lot of pensioners had clearly thought when the Old Age Pension came out it would be in addition to their occupational pension so that maybe for once in their lives they might even start to approach a reasonable standard of living.  However, what followed Ormsby’s letter was copious correspondence between him and other senior personnel in the Great Southern around the country and various elderly men who were in receipt of the pension from the company who wrote of their distress and concern at the proposal to cut their pensions.  By the way, women weren’t getting any pensions, the 143 don’t arise in this case.So not only did the letters from the pensioners illustrate the poverty in which many of the former wage staff of the company were living, but they also shed light on the sense of vulnerability which the company’s decision inflicted on many of them.In February 1909, for example, a gate man, William Byrne, who lived at 50 Arbour Hill, was granted an Old Age Pension of 5 shillings.  He wrote to Francis Ormsby because the company was going to withdraw his occupational pension of 6 shillings.  He wrote that he was 76 years of age and had no other means of support.  The withdrawal of the pension would mean he would be thrown on the mercy of the union or the workhouse for survival as he couldn’t live on 5 shillings a week.  There were many other letters in a similar vein and eventually the board decided to cut the free pensions only by the amount of the Old Age Pension granted by the Government so at least the pensioners were no worse off, not any better but it could have been worse.Well, one aspect of the introduction of the Old Age Pension in Ireland was how it revealed the extent of very irregular recording of births.Now this unfortunately is a typically racist cartoon from Punch but it does ... if you can see it’s you know ...Officer investigating Old Age Pension Claims “Well. Mrs Brady, and how old might you be?” Mrs Brady “Sorra wan of me knows, indeed, Sor.”.I’m no good at this kind of thing and it really is awful.  But the officer says to think, don’t you know the date of your birth and she says“The date of my birth, is it?  Sure there was no such things as dates when I was born!” (laughter)Which is okay for us to laugh at but not the English audience it was aimed at.  But, as I said, it does show that people had to prove that they were over 70 in order to get the state pension and they didn’t have birth certs so there lots of mentions in the correspondence from the pensioners of the sorts of documents and other kinds of evidence that they’d have to produce to try and prove to the pensions officer, the local pensions board, that they actually were entitled at 70 years of age.So there were multiple cases of people who weren’t able to prove that so they basically were left to swing unless you could come up with somebody like a local authority figure like a priest or a local policeman who would be prepared to swear for it if you had no other form of documentary evidence.The Act also excluded the dissolute and the occupants of workhouses, presumably on the basis that they were not deserving of the pension because they had not contributed their labour during their lifetimes.  Several of the letters from Great Southern pensioners responding to the initial notification of the pension cuts from the company had given their local union or workhouse as their address, proving that their occupational pension was already insufficient to keep them in their old age.Then in the 19th century during the early decades of the company’s existence the employees had remained fairly contented or at least they hadn’t been obviously revolting, although there had been some occasions when men had sought better conditions and wages.  The boards policy was to be ruthlessly opposed to any appearance of combination or organisation of unions among the men to rewards those who remained loyal in any conflict and to grant small increases in pay from time to time.During the decade which ended with the outbreak of the First World War the number of passengers carried by the Great Southern increased to over 6 million annually and the yearly freight (21.54 inaudible) to 2 million.  In 1913 the company’s income reached 1 million 600 thousand which was significant even for the time.  This gave shareholders a fairly healthy dividend but it wasn’t reflected in any increase of wages at the lower levels.So industrial unrest which was widespread in the early days of the 20th century started to have some effect on the Great Southern.  In late August 1911The Irish Worker, the newspaper of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, defiantly claimed on behalf of railway workers:In the future we’re not going to have the men crawling into the office of anybody of railway directors.  In future, workers would stand up for themselves and take things like union recognition, higher pay and shorter hours as rights.There were two railway strikes as a result in 1911.  One was brief and successful and the other longer and ended unfortunately in complete defeat for the strikers.  The first was really part of a British strike and it was Irish workers of the North Wall joining a strike by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants which was an English union.  They were joined by the ITGWU but following negotiations in London the strike was settled within 24 hours.  The second strike began in September 1911 and railway workers refused to handle goods from a timber yard that had sacked workers for union membership.  They were in turn sacked by the Great Southern and this led to an all-out strike along the lines to Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Tuam.Now, economic historian Conor McKay has made quite a study of the 1911 strike and he notes that William Goulding, who was the owner of the Great Southern and the Chairman of the board at the time, had a number of powerful weapons at his disposal.  The first was money obviously.  Those worked who ‘scabbed’ the strike were paid a £10 bonus which was quite significant.  Station masters were given clocks in gratitude for their service throughout the strike.  I’m not sure if they would have preferred the £10 but the clock was a prestige thing.  Another advantage held by Goulding was his ability to exploit sectarian animosities.  Northern Protestant workers were brought south to take the places of the striking workers for the duration of the strike.  In the final resort Goulding had the force of the British state to back him up. Thousands of British soldiers – and we can see some of them here – were drafted in to man the lines and stations and to make sure they were not blocked by pickets.  One observer thought it looked as if all Ireland was turned into a military camp and actually the picture on the right there was from a German journal because this drew quite a lot of attention in recognition that the workers were being treated very badly and the state forces being used against them.  But Goulding just rejected all attempts at arbitration, even those people like the Catholic Archbishop Louis Walsh and the nationalist leader Michael Davitt had come forward and offered to intervene and by late September the workers’ representatives were indeed, contrary to the Irish Workers confident prediction earlier, were crawling to Goulding to beg for reinstatement.  The company did take back some workers – those who were identified as quiet and inoffensive and they sacked those identified as militant.  The workers in the railway were still recovering from the impact of the 1911 strike when the First World War began in 1914.Now, when the war started in 1914 the Great Southern employed over 9,000 staff or one third of Ireland’s railway workers in total.  It was one of Ireland’s largest employers outside just even the railway networks.  But unlike the other European powers with mass armies based on compulsory military service the UK which we were part of at the time depending on the small professional army and this was really depleted by the end of 1914 so huge efforts were starting to be made to recruit voluntarily and although it had been asserted at the beginning of the war it would be over by Christmas 1914 it was beginning to be obvious by 1915 that wasn’t the case.  And a lot of the efforts weren’t just aimed at persuading workers to enlist but were focused on employers to persuade them to release workers and to make do with less labour.  So William Goulding asked for an assurance that the Government would not call upon any railway man who had returned himself as willing to enlist if the company employing him was unable to dispense with his services.  An undertaking in this regard has been given to English railway companies in September 1914 and a similar arrangement was made for the Irish railways giving the companies a veto on the enlistment of staff members.  At the outbreak of the First World War the railways in Britain were immediately placed under government control but the Irish companies were left free to run their lines until late in 1916 when the Irish Railway Executive Committee was set up and the Great Southern’s General Manager, E. A. Neale was the Chairman but it wasn’t a government body, it was still an independent industry body just reporting back to the government rather than their own shareholders.  They were responsible for controlling all the activities of the Irish railway companies and the railways didn’t actually return to the management of the individual owners until August 1921.  Now, in Britain as we said the British railways had been negotiating with Lord Kitchener who was the Minister, Home Secretary, for the war and because they were so intent on getting workers out of employment and into the army there was a big focus on recruiting women.  Now, that didn’t happen here because we never had conscription but at the same time it opened up a lot of opportunities in railway employment as men were released and particularly the numbers of female clerks who were employed enormously grew in the period of the First World War and many of them didn’t leave afterwards.  So it changed the nature of the workforce at least as far as the white collar work was concerned.But the women were really only supposed to be employed for the duration of the war in order to protect the jobs of the men who had enlisted and although women came forward in huge numbers and did anything that was asked of them and showed that there was no need for it to be an all-male industry, it was really made very clear indeed that it was for the duration of the war.  In Ireland the only significant change in the nature of employment was the hiring of ticket collectors by the Cork Blackrock and Passage railway and this might not seem terribly significant now but in 1915 it was quite a scandal.  In a write up in the National Union of Rail Women’s Journal Railway Review remarked that:The ticket collector is often exposed to the economies of a rough element which passes through the ticket gates and this is the objectionable part of the position unsuitable to the fair sex.  In addition to consideration of working hours and the expense involved in providing extra toilet facilities for them the author suggested that attention would also have to be given to the conditions under which the women would have to work and still be properly supervised and safeguarded to make sure that the sexes would not be brought into undesirable association.Now the poor dear. (laughter)  And this is written by a union man, anyway.  In the Irish railway companies women were employed as caretakers in premises that were used as dormitories for drivers and maintenance staff who needed overnight accommodation away from their homes.  I couldn’t find any evidence in the files that anyone was concerned that they might be undesirable associations in their work but you never know.  Certainly women upholsterers who were employed in production and repair of the carriage furnishings were released from their training in what was called the sewing class 5 minutes earlier than their male colleagues in order to keep them separate socially.  Another group of women worked as crossing gate keepers and their conditions were pretty dreadful and the pay low but they were generally given use of the gatekeeper’s house and this group of women seems to be the only one that actually combined both single and married women and widows where the clerical work was for single women and the cleaning work was for widows, often to provide them with an income if their husbands had died.One exception to containment of women in clerical and so-called traditional women’s work in catering, cleaning and sewing was Mrs Margaret McKenna who was the Great Southern Station Mistress in Kilfenora County Kerry, although she doesn’t really seem to have benefitted significantly from her post of responsibility.  In 1915 her salary was £45 per year which was roughly similar to the earnings of a lady clerk with several years experience.  Margaret had been appointed in 1904 when she was 41 years of age but her terms and conditions would have included the free occupancy of the station house and I imagine that was intended to balance the relatively low pay.  She was a Catholic widow living with her three sons but the family members were all from Dublin so when I looked in the 1901 Census I found that her husband was still alive at this stage and he was the Station Master in Lucan which would have been a reasonably prestigious station.  So it’s likely that because he had died between the two censuses that this is where she needed to be given a job but the files unfortunately didn’t say why they felt they had to move her from Kerry and why she couldn’t have just taken over the job in Lucan.  I can guess but I’m not supposed to speculate as a historian (laughs).But the houses, again in Kilfenora the house is described as a second class building and there were only two rooms for the family to live in whereas the Lucan one had been bigger, there were five rooms, so that may have had something to do with it, that it was a better house.  But another significant thing is that by the 1911 Census Margaret is living with her sons and her two daughters are in-mates of the Presentation Convent Orphanage in Dundrum and Tipperary, presumably because she simply couldn’t afford to keep all of them on her meagre pay.  Others, Kate and Jane I think, no, the young Margaret, don’t appear in the 1911 Census and I couldn’t find them anywhere at all suggests that they may have gotten married in the meantime or maybe they emigrated but they don’t turn up in the British records either.  However, Margaret records show that she left the company in January 1922 when she would have been just short of her 60th birthday but there is nothing at all about her circumstances and she wouldn’t have been entitled to a pension because it hadn’t been sorted at that point and she wouldn’t have been entitled to the Old Age Pension either so presumably she found more lucrative employment.  Anyway, unfortunately I don’t know where the story went.But there were no national pay scales applicable to the industry at that time and each grade within each railway company had its own rates of pay.  So if you were engaged at a minimum rate men were commonly awarded an annual increment, although the scale was usually reached within 5 years.  Temporary staff would only receive a minimum wage with no increments and of course because of the deal done between the British Government and by consequence the Irish railway companies with the National Union of Railway men women were hired as temporary workers so they weren’t getting any increments or anything else.Peter Rigney has shown how the records of the Great Southern helped throw some light on the movement of troops into Dublin in Easter week in 1916 and also the British Army’s response to events in the provinces.  The general manager at the Great Southern at the time made a report to the board on the 5th of May.  It is headed:The Sinn Fein InsurrectionHe said:I beg to report for the information of the directors that on 12.25 on Easter Monday 24th of April the military authorities telephoned the superintendent of the line to stop all traffic and to prepare military specials for The Curragh immediately.  Empty specials left King’s Bridge at 1.17pm, 1.45pm, 2.06pm and 2.26pm returning at once with troops, the last arriving at 5.30pm.  3,000 men were thus conveyed to the city.So obviously the railway was playing a crucial part in the almost immediate reaction to what was going on in Dublin on Easter Monday.  He went on to say that:The military on arriving took possession of the station (this was King’s Bridge) and arranged for its defence.  Some of the window screens etc., were broken to enable the troops to fire from them.  We were next ordered to stop all trains then proceeding to Dublin, the last conveying passengers being the 9.45am from Cork.Rigby points out that the 1916 Rising was envisaged by the Volunteers originally as conventional military engagement and this meant that large bodies of troops would be confronting each other and in this scenario the railway network would play a central role, they’d have to you know in helping to mass troops to set piece battles.  And in April a crucial tactic in the anti conscription campaign – 1918 sorry – was a general strike, including the stoppage of all work on the railway network.  So it was still recognised that as the form of transport that was keeping the country either moving or not it would allow you to control it, the railway network was absolutely crucial.Now the slides here, you can’t see them very well, but they are just really to show the impact of some of the workers.  The letter, the typed one here, is in relation to a group of men who had been sacked for not turning up for work during Easter week and some of them had pleaded that it wasn’t their fault, they couldn’t travel, they couldn’t get passed the soldiers but it was quite clear that others had been busy doing other things themselves and had been involved in the fighting and certainly there were several Irish Citizen Army men working on the railways, they were not getting their jobs back.  The Secretary at the time, Crawford, said that yes they would give jobs back to some of the men and he names them specifically but there would have been demotions for them and they had to apply for them and everybody else was basically being told we don’t want to know you anymore. The other letter is interesting because it’s written by one of the women on behalf of the women who clean the stations and saying because they couldn’t get to work during Easter week 1916 they’d lost a week’s wages which would have been pretty drastic for them and pleading extreme hardship and the company did agree to pay them the week back because it wasn’t a political dimension obviously from that point of view.But in the 1921 War of Independence it was mainly a gorilla war so the railways weren’t as important.  The struggle didn’t have all that much material effect on the Great Southern but though there were lots of temporary interruptions to traffic, mainly because of military orders or by refusals of employees to work trains carrying troops or armaments and that lacking of military equipment was an extremely important weapon on the side of the Irish independence fighters, so large sections of the railway were shut for long and short periods.  There were hundreds of incidents of damage to company property during the civil war which followed the War of Independence.  So by about November 1922 about a third of the system had ceased to operate and there were multiplications of malicious damage to the track, stations and the trains themselves.  But following the ending of the civil war the new Irish Government gave priority to maintaining the railways as transport hub and they set up a Railway Defence and Maintenance Corp which was engaged in patrolling the lines and repairing damage.  So throughout the conflict the company’s employees had kept some sort of service operating although sometimes in conditions of danger to themselves and their families but then you know everybody was in conditions of danger to themselves and their families at the time.So eventually the tax payer paid for restoring material underlay to the railways but no compensation was ever received for the loss of travel although they did try to claim for it.  By this stage the situation of the Great Southern was so serious financially with expenses up and receipts down that the company notified the Government of its intention to suspend all operation of the railway network.  But the Government took the view that railways were essential for the life of the country and they wouldn’t permit the proposed closure so the directors decided to maintain the services as best they could until the fighting should cease and the long task of restoration could be undertaken.The Government also made it a policy to bring about the fusion of all the railways in the Free State into one company.  They threatened legislation to enforce a merger if it wasn’t brought about voluntarily.  Consultations failed and in April 1924 a Bill was introduced and became an Act with very little delay.  Under its terms the larger companies were to amalgamate first and then absorb the smaller railways.  Most of debate in the Dáil actually, as it went through the various stages, concerned who would be shareholders in the company.  There was very little about the terms and conditions of those whose livelihoods were going to be in play.  At the second reading of the Bill, however, Tom Johnson, the Labour deputy, expressed his anger at what he believed was the wrong focus of these negotiations.  He said:The railways in Ireland should be directed towards furthering the development of Ireland, rather than that Ireland should be an instrument for furthering development of railways and that railway policy should be subordinated to national policy and development.  It has been pointed out in the past many times that railway policy has been directed to convey commodities and passengers for as long distance as possible to England and conveying commodities from England for as long distance as possible to increase the revenue of the railways and the effect of this policy has been to develop this importation and exportation not because of its advantage to Ireland because it would be of advantage to the railway companies, both in Ireland and England.And as I said (laughs) there was really no reference to the people who would be delivering all of this service one way or the other, regardless of the management.But in the Spring of 1925 the mergers had gone through.  We now had the Great Southern Railways and a number of parliamentary questions were asked of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Patrick McGilligan – who was overseeing the change, and they indicate that the merger of the railway companies into the Great Southern Railway was causing hardship for employees of the Great Southern and other companies.  John Lyons T.D. claimed that 217 men from the Midland and Great Western Railway had already been dismissed at this point and a further 32 were under notice of dismissal on the 4th of April 1925.  The Minister replied that all those who had qualified would receive the compensation provided for in the Railways Act.  If they registered at an employment exchange their names would be submitted for any suitable employment.  He stressed that the efficient running of the railway company was a matter for the company and he would not interfere.  I’ll refrain from commenting on similarities to similar ministers 100 years later.  Anyway (laughs), Liam Davin who actually was a Station Master by profession before he was elected before the Dáil  wondered how many railway employees had already been made redundant and if the minister was aware that the GSR was adopting the practice of calling upon the men to retire without, in many cases, mentioning compensation at all and in others merely asking the employee the amount of compensatory claims and generally replacing the onus of claiming calculation of compensation on the employees and whether he was aware that the railway company is bound to advise each redundant employee of the compensation to which he is entitled.  Now the Act had a third schedule that set out the rates of compensation which were not generous but were fixed and should at least have provided a minimum payment.  The minister not surprisingly responded that the procedures were laid out in the Act and he was sure the company was following them and of course it wasn’t his place to interfere.  So the question of intimidation by the company was raised again over subsequent months suggesting that concerns were being raised nationally as the TDs asking the questions were coming from all over the country and it wasn’t because the Great Southern Railway was now the one body it was all about them.  Further questions related to the adequacy of the compensation payments and of course a few months later it was beginning to seem that they weren’t adequate and again the minister stated he had no control over anything to do with the Great South Railway, even though in the Act it said that he did.The issue of a new pension scheme for employees of the GSR, the Great Southern Railway, was raised but it actually wasn’t until 1934 that this was finally resolved and this was only after lengthy hearings of the railway tribunal.  It took 2 years of hearings before it was finally settled and they followed the pattern of British railway industry.So the first 25 years of the 20th century were turbulent ones for the people of Dublin and the rest of Ireland.  Despite the glowing portrait of elegant and leisurely travel evoked by the guide book that I quoted at the beginning of this talk the reality for most of the people delivering the service was low pay, long hours and consciousness that their work was not particularly valued by their employers.  There is an extract here from the rules and regulations for the guidance of the officers and men in the service of the Great Southern and Western Railway Company published in 1915.  It’s indicative of the attitude of the senior management to the position of the ordinary workers at the time and basically it is saying:No servant when on duty or in uniform is allowed to enter a station refreshment room or any other refreshment room under the control of the company, except by permission of the Station Master or person in charge of the station.I was getting very wound up about this in discussing it with somebody who said “Well, sure you know they wouldn’t have been let go in and be drinking during the day” but it is only what was considered the servants, in other words the lower grades that were being excluded because of course you could trust officers (laughs), you know the white collar workers.So the Great Southern and Western Railway was by no means a bad employer really by the standards of early 20th century Ireland.  However, the workplace apartheid that categorised white collar employees and skilled workers, such as locomotive drivers as officers while all the others were mere servants, did create a mindset that facilitated the poor treatment of already vulnerable people and that was still evident very much in 1925 when a new era was supposedly dawning.Thank you.  (Applause)Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. 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