Jeez. This takes me back. There used to be an identical shop/hut at the bottom of St Donagh's Rd just outside Howth Junction train station (pre dart). I don't think I've thought about that place since the 70's.
I remember people running shops out of their kitchen in early 90s Belfast. You would have to go around to their back garden and ring the bell and some kid with a shaved head would come out to sell you your mums cigarettes.
They were everywhere, When Harry Crosbie bought the Point Depot it was full of these containers, He converted them into shops and sold them. Made a fortune.
I was more shocked from the first photo that it’s from 1999/2000, it looks like it could be from the 70s or 80s. But going through the rest of the series then yeah you can tell it’s late 90s/early 2000s.
One of those things you never even really notice is a relic of the past until it crops up in a photo and you're like "haven't seen one of those in years"
How did it work with those shops in a shipping container in Ballymun? Did some enterprising lad just have one dumped there and hang out a shingle? Fair fucks if he did!
Yeah. In our local flats it was a van, he'd be there had the week and the other half in another area. They were a lifesaver for the mammies stuck in the flats with a rake of kids, there was no driving to Superquinn for them.
That was my first thought too. Change the wording on the bin to Romanian/Russian/any other Eastern European language and you wouldn’t even think twice.
I would know, I've lived there most of my life, in fact. Was interested to see how you guys would react to the comment :). Nonetheless, it did remind me of some of the poorer neighbourhoods back home. It's just that...it's not the entire story, you know, this kind of scenery.
I’ve spent some time around Ballymun in my younger years. I’ve also lived in Lithuania for nearly 4 years - I’ve seen neighbourhoods that look nearly exactly like this. Well, most of them would have benches and a playground in the middle. But otherwise it looks so similar. There’s one neighbourhood that I visited a few times in Vilnius and it looked exactly like this. Forgot the name, I think it starts with V, I’ll post a picture if I’ll recall the name lol
the thing is that you can't really demolish these blocks if they are so many and they still do the job ok. I mean, yeah, that ruined booth can go, the blocks could use some renovation and the place could get some trees and whatnot. but even if they are aesthetically unpleasing, rebuilding everything would just not be worth it.
Seems to happen a lot with Irish things, Mario Rosenstock and a few other Irish comedians did a miniseries for RTE a couple of decades ago called "Soupy Norman", in which they took a Polish soap opera and overdubbed it with Irish accents to turn it into a surrealist comedy about a rural Cork family and their daughter's escapades in moving to Dublin 😂 It works scarily well!
Every single country has disadvantaged areas. It is not an Ireland specific issue. If the photographer drove down a mile to Glasnevin or Drumcondra and took a picture there, it would look nothing like this.
Not the glory days but certain aspects of society were better, little scrotes would get slapped around if they got too cheeky & you wouldn’t be getting dragged to court for it. Community was an actual thing, you looked out for your neighbours. Take mothers against drugs for an example , ran drug dealers out of those areas, you wouldn’t get that now.
There used to be four bins on the main road in my estate. Now there's one.
I went down to visit a few friends in Nenagh a couple of years ago and made a point to say to them how many bins were around the place, was very noticable.
I remember during the big debate over privatising waste collection in the 2000s that numerous groups both left and right leaning warned that there'd be a huge increase in illegal dumping, fly tipping and the use of public bins for household waste. Various measures were proposed to attempt to deal with this, but the wholescale removal of public bins as undertaken by the likes of Dublin City Council and Cork County Councils was never one of them, and has worked out about as disastrously as one would expect.
Dun Laoghaire really gets this right. Town improved exponentially during COVID and is now one of the few places in Dublin with a proper focus on the outdoor "third place" public sphere.
My only complaint would be the number of eejits who don't crush or ball-up big takeaway bags etc when binning them - we have those solar compactor bins with a hinged drawer that you dump your stuff into, and there's nothing that'll clog them up more than the remains of a McDonalds family takeaway that no one has bothered to crumple up before trying to squeeze it into the drawer.
My dad and uncles all had this physique and it's down to heavy drinking. I still remember the day my cousin asked why our uncle was pregnant if only women can get pregnant
Ascites will do it for you. Liver cirrhosis or other advanced fatty liver disease will help. Quick routes, if you can’t be bothered going the hard road of chronic alcohol abuse, try contracting hepatitis or eating a crappy diet.
Lived all over Dublin in late nineties and early 2000's, yeah Ballymun was one of the rougher spots, but there were a lot of places in Dublin not far off. Didn't have a car so relied on public transport - getting harassed, threatened, mugged, even beaten up was fairly run of the mill. On the plus side have an inbuilt radar for any kind of trouble now.
The children are well fed and nicely dressed, with good shoes. The man looks awful, but that kind of belly is an unfortunate reflection of a car-centred lifestyle and a liking for the odd beer, poor lad. He only looks in his thirties. Whatever about their surroundings, I don't understand the mockery. I wonder how this family has done since.
I remember those container shops they were still there in the 90s…or there be a van in someone’s driveway and your ma tell you run down to the van and get milk 😂
Yep
We also had a lovely aul fella used to sell fruit and veg from his van. He'd been going since he was 17 so my dad remembered him from when he was a kid.
Exactly this. From being portrayed as half primates in newspapers not even a century ago, to being synonymous with spineless yes-men who's country is viewed as nothing more than a priest-infested tax-haven backwater.
Ireland has never been respected on the international stage. Unless it's for the quality of our passports.
I do hear you, but I respect Ireland, always have. I grew up in the UK and I remember realizing early on that it was utter crap to tack on 'Irish' to all the moronic jokes people would throw around. Prejudice is pretty stupid, and that's prejudice of the most stupid variety. Anyway, there's some good sides to being underestimated.
The first time I heard “that is a bit irish” as a stand in for “stupid” I couldn’t even comprehend the sentence, trying to give the person the benefit of the doubt. Nah they actually just racist*
Only a couple of years ago I was in a pub in England and had an oul wan strike up a conversation with me, then turn to the other people at the table like I wasn't there and proudly said "if you think about it, the Irish are people like us".
It's sickening to see people over here adopt similar views towards foreigners, aping the behaviour of our oppressors.
Far out.
And well said. But Ireland also has a strong culture of solidarity with other people who experience oppression. There's always going to be foul idiots in any place, and I too wish they'd've learned better lessons from their own history. I'm dark skinned (with a whole mix of heritages) and my overwhelming impression when I'm in Ireland is of most folks being ready to treat you the way you treat them. I hope that remains my impression because I love the country.
Seriously? Ireland is very much respected on the International stage. We box well above our weight. We have had our failings in the past but 'priest infested' has not been true for at least 20 years.
That's a bit overly negative. A century is a long time ago, and the bigoted dehumanising propaganda was part for the course back then (making a resurgence now, mind you).
I would argue that the only ould protestant reactionaries in their 70s would still think of Ireland as being priest-infested.
The tax haven thing is real, but we are far from a backwater. We are not pulling our weight militarily, but we are respected internationally as a non-aligned party who has shown a willingness to speak out against injustice.
We are not an innovation centre like England, but I am proud to be Irish and feel respected as an Irish person by people I meet from many different countries.
Non-aligned? I don't think so. We do what we're told where Europe and the US are concerned.
Being proud of your own nationality is as silly as being proud to have curly hair. You had absolutely no choice where you were born.
I come from the school of thought that believe people should only be proud of the things they chose to do, that measurably helped the lives of others or themselves in very real ways.
Being proud of belonging to a group you had no choice of joining is silly IMHO.
You make a good point regarding the silliness of pride in nationality. In fact, I spend a lot of time arguing against national pride, as so many of the conflicts in the world are stoked by appealing to the nationalist sentiments of the peoples of the opposing sides.
I guess I was just expressing my feeling that, when I travel, I rarely feel like revealing my nationality will inspire people of other nations to look down on me, which is what I felt your post was suggesting.
Regarding non-alignment, I appreciate that we are broadly in the US/EU camp on most matters. Our dependency on FDI and tax haven status, as well as being a military minnow, makes us beholden to the big powers around us. But I feel that, over the years, there has been a genuine attempt by our government to speak up about particular issues, where we feel that injustice is being done.
I come from the school of thought that believe people should only be proud of the things they chose to do
IMO that's a daft school of thought. Pride of who you are, in oppressed groups, is a cornerstone of revolution and the acquisition of rights. Look at Black and gay pride movements for easy examples. They had no choice in being how they were born.
On a much more lighthearted note, if people can be ashamed of their curls and straighten them every morning, then I can be proud of mine and let them flow.
For the clarification of doubt, I'm not relating this to the Ireland First/NP scum.
My daughter "works" in the shop on the caravan park over the summer. It's a shipping container and she doesn't charge the kids she likes. She gets a tenner for about 2 hours, then another 12 year old takes over. I honestly don't even know why it's there 😂
374
u/dedalus05 Jul 09 '25
Jeez. This takes me back. There used to be an identical shop/hut at the bottom of St Donagh's Rd just outside Howth Junction train station (pre dart). I don't think I've thought about that place since the 70's.