Voices from Dublin in “the olden days”

In Our Day: An Oral History of Dublin’s Bygone Days,

by Kevin C. Kearns

(Gill Books, €24.99 / £18.99) 

Back when the world was young I had “a friend next door” who always referred to “the olden days”, not referring to the Middle Ages, but it transpired to the days when his parents were young.  Now however with the passing of time what we saw and heard then is indeed “the olden days”, the very streets we knew having passed into history and been built over.

It is the extraordinary changes that make the work and writings of Professor Kearns so valuable.

This is an oral history, that is a book built  around not what has been culled from the dry pages of public records, but recorded from the lips of the people of Dublin themselves, often in their curt and colourful language.

This is the latest book by an Irish-American academic who has been researching and writing about Dublin since the 1980s, making in all some twenty eight visits to the city interviewing and photographing its people and places.

The subtitle of this book well sums up what he has been about. He divides his account into some twelve chapters, perhaps one for every month of the year, moving from early life and innocence through to “nostalgia, sorrow and death.” As a now infamous newspaper once claimed, all human life is here.

His books as a whole are an invaluable account of an urban culture in Dublin that has vanished and in which Irish students of folklife had little interest”

A special feature of the book are Kearns’ own photographs of Dublin life and its personalities, which are all very striking and human.

But readers of this book will realise that it is the portal to a small library of other books by Kearns from the same publisher reaching back to 1980s in which the passing of an urban culture is recorded as it happened. No Irish writer has produced anything like this.

But compared with the work of say Studs Terkel in Chicago, or the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in Mexico in The Children of Sanchez, Kearns leaves wide areas of experience unexplored.  But nevertheless his books as a whole are an invaluable account of an urban culture in Dublin that has vanished and in which Irish students of folklife had little interest.

Kevin Kearns has created a treasury of Dublin experience that becomes more valuable with every passing month.