Boqueria, Stoneybatter

"Whaddya mean, it's a destination restaurant?" Colley, a regular character in the Moss Reid series of novels, sounds more narky than usual this morning. "What's a destination restaurant when it's at home?"

Slack space #3: Block T and The Complex

Locksmiths can tell you a thing about the ups and downs of an area, the comings and goings in the neighbourhood, new homeowners, fledgling businesses, a spate of burglaries, squatters, break-ins, you know the kind of thing.

Stoneybatter skyline

Music documentarian Myles O'Reilly shot his classy new video of Anna-Mieke Bishop and her band a couple of days ago. It gives a relatively unusual view of Stoneybatter from up on the roof, during a sublime sunset. The music's great too.

Official: Stoneybatter is now hip

Blimey! Since the start of the year our neighbourhood has been designated a "hip" destination by the international media.

When the Spice Girls did Stoneybatter

The Spice Girls came to Stoneybatter on 27 January 1998. They were in town anyway to rehearse for their world domination tour, which kicked off a month later in Dublin's Point Theatre, but they needed a quiet and quaint backstreet location to shoot their video for "Stop". They found Carnew Street.

Arbour Hill Cemetery #1

Arbour Hill's military cemetery is the last resting place of 14 of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. It is currently undergoing a revamp.

A little patch of (UN) sky blue

The UN memorial garden in Arbour Hill in Dublin will be an early location in the fourth Moss Reid book. A small garden with at least three entrances/exits - one directly onto the street - yet secluded, tranquil and rather special.

Hangman, hangman...

Dublin has its fair share of bloody street names. Literally.

Arbour Hill Church, Stoneybatter

Arbour Hill's church and cemetery will feature prominently in Dublin's Easter 1916 centenary commemorations. And in Book #4 of the Moss Reid series too, as it happens. You heard it here first.

The ford of the hurdles

OK, I'll 'fess up. I slept through history at school. I've a rough idea about Dublin before the nineteenth century, but Dublin before the ninth century (i.e. before the Vikings)? A vague blur.

The Belfry, Stoneybatter

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Belfry (mentioned briefly in Black Marigolds) is one of Stoneybatter's oldest pubs.

It's on a prominent street corner, hard to miss, an old landmark with its red-and-blue paintwork and those four splendid light-globes at the front saying "Shortts General Store".

Yet with its big screens and Sky Sport and pool table, the Belfry is/was in fact a relative newcomer. In the 1980s and early 1990s it used to be known as Daly's.

The manhole wars of the new millennium

Time for a very long ramble about the ground behind my feet.

Picture the scene. It's mid-May 2011, the week before the Queen of England comes to town.

The Irish weather has been kinder than usual this spring, and there have been marches and demonstrations, anti-visit posters, bomb threats, hoaxes, suspect packages, a pipe bomb on a bus from Maynooth, surveillance operations and pre-emptive arrests north and south of the Border.

The changing face of Love Supreme

Chapter 28 of Ghost Flight begins:

"One thing about Manor Street: turn your back on it for five minutes and there's another little change. 

"Like this new coffee shop. It used to be a florists, and a Polish grocery before that, and a..."

The real-life Stoneybatter café I had in mind is called Love Supreme.

Smithfield and Stoneybatter by drone

The rise of the drones is a recurring theme in the third Moss Reid book Ghost Flight.

Here's some recent aerial footage from a drone as it flies around Stoneybatter and - more particularly - Smithfield in Dublin. Ignore the music and concentrate on all that green copper roofing.



(And while we're at it, my rant about drone porn is on my writing blog at melhealy.wordpress.com)

Stoneybatter says 'Yes'

I've seen stranger turnabouts in elections before, but surely the SNP will take most - possibly all - of Scotland's seats this week, and on 22 May Stoneybatter will produce an overwhelming "Yes" vote in Ireland's same-sex marriage referendum.

I've only anecdotal evidence for the latter: friends and neighbours, several prominent pub and shop fronts, every second lamp post, so many canvassers, yet not a "No" in sight. It's a bolshie old place alright...

Brendan Behan's Cowtown

You don't come across many films showing the massive old cattle market in Stoneybatter, aka "Cowtown". But you do get glimpses of it (around the 23-minute mark) in this documentary called "Brendan Behan's Dublin".

The Mystery of the Museum Rest and the dead drop

This is the twisting tale of two adjacent buildings in Stoneybatter. Both have almost disappeared, physically speaking, yet somehow they continue to tell their stories. In their crumbling, decaying state they have become a piece of art.

Hyne's Bar, Prussia Street

There is a deliberate mistake in my second 'Moss Reid' novel Black Marigolds. A pub scene set in Stoneybatter refers not once but three times to Hynes's pub on Prussia Street.

That's not its exact name, though many locals call it that. Even Come Here To Me, the excellent blog about Dublin's life and culture, slips up on it.

Look closely. It's "Hyne's Bar". One of the pub's regulars, Paddy Losty, was immortalised as a "pintman" in social historian Kevin C. Kearns's 1997 book Dublin Pub Life and Lore.

While you can find plenty of entries for "Hynes" in Irish phonebooks, I've yet to find anyone called "Hyne". So is the sign itself the mistake?

Greek Orthodox Church, Dublin

The occasional tourist might ask you for directions "to the church on Arbour Hill". They're probably looking for the Church of the Sacred Heart, with its burial ground and monument to the 1916 rebel leaders.

But there's another church on the hill in Stoneybatter: the Greek Orthodox Church.

Soulful Bistro, Manor Street

Where exactly does the Stoneybatter district of Dublin begin and end?

About a month ago a bilingual sign appeared overnight near the top of Blackhall Place announcing "Fáilte go Bóthar na gCloch" / "Welcome to Stoneybatter". But surely that dangerous piece of street furniture isn't the actual, official start of Stoneybatter, is it?

If there's no consensus today about Stoneybatter's precise borders, at least most locals would be in broad agreement about its epicentre: on Manor Street. Or possibly, and more specifically, at the cobbled triangle near the top of Manor Street where it meets Aughrim Street on the left and eventually dissolves into Prussia Street on the right.