'Educating Rita', from Zoom to Mooz

Believe it or not, an upmarket new Italian grocer in Stoneybatter called Mooz was once a location for a very famous film from 1983.

Dalymount - end of an era

This new video is a fitting tribute to the end of an era at Dalymount Park in Phibsborough, down the road from Stoneybatter on Dublin's northside. It has a fair few drone shots...

Grangegorman Military Cemetery

Grangegorman Military Cemetery is back in the news again. Yesterday morning Canada's Ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers, pounced on a protester during a State ceremony to remember the British soldiers killed in the Easter Rising.

The US embassy, Ballsbridge

The US embassy in Dublin is due to crop up in book #4 of the Moss Reid series (no spoilers)...

Cromwell's Quarters, Murdering Lane, or The 39 (or is it 40?) Steps

For most of its life, right through the Victorian age, it was known as "Murdering Lane" or "Murdering-Lane" with a hyphen. Or "The Murd'ring Lane". Like the title of a bloodthirsty crime novel.

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 Phoenix Park Tunnel

The Phoenix Park Tunnel is probably a complete mystery to most Dubliners, though that may change soon.

Drovers and drivers on the North Circular

Here's an old photo of a herd of cattle  on the North Circular Road in Dublin. Yeah, we really did have regular cattle drives up and down those streets back then. Not exactly John Ford or John Wayne, maybe, but just as "awesome" in their own little way...

Streetlighting man

If someone in Ireland is described as "a gas man", "a gas character" or "great gas altogether", the gas person in question probably isn't employed by the gas company.

He almost certainly has nothing to do with the 1976 Gas Act, or the beautiful old art deco building in D'Olier Street, and he's probably not a lamplighter either.

Yet a lamplighter is a gas character, in both senses of the word. His literary fans (I'm using the term loosely) include Joyce, Plunkett and Dickens.

The Wellington Monument and Kurt Cobain

Just two words: "Kurt's dead."

Kurt. Is. Dead. And to think Nirvana were supposed to be in town that evening, supposed to be playing the Simmonscourt Pavilion in the RDS.

Dublin by drone, and Google Earthed to death

Sometimes height is everything. Everything in terms of perspective, status, aerial superiority, power.

Bicycle polo in the Phoenix Park

Irish novelist William Trevor once talked in an award acceptance speech about his childhood memories of reading detective stories:

"All over England, it seemed to me, bodies were being discovered by housemaids in libraries. Village poison pens were tirelessly at work. There was murder in Mayfair, on trains, in airships, in Palm Court lounges, between the acts. Golfers stumbled over corpses on fairways. Chief Constables awoke to them in their gardens. We had nothing like it in West Cork."

I know what he means. Take polo. As opposed to bike polo.

Farmleigh House, Phoenix Park

Farmleigh gets a starring role in Chapter 23 of my first 'Moss Reid' mystery, Another Case in Cowtown. Here's how the chapter opens...

Where is Stoneybatter in Dublin?

Stoneybatter is the centre of Moss Reid's universe in my series of crime novels about the foodie PI. But where exactly is Stoneybatter (aka Cowtown or Oxmantown)?

A Google Map of places in 'Another Case...'

The first book in the 'Moss Reid' series, Another Case in Cowtown, is pretty much a “Stoneybatter novel”. I've compiled a map on Google Maps of some of the real-life places in this part of Dublin mentioned during the story.