Virtual Dublin

I've been living in Berlin for over five years, and I don't miss Dublin. But there are many ways for me to stay in touch with life in Dublin - aside from picking up the phone to call a brother or sister or friend.

My favourite online connection with Dublin is this chat forum where I am a member under - guess what! - my own name. I had set up a Barney and Molly page - spreading the word about my book - this link is also to the slide show of photos from the book. Yes, this is a plug for my book!

There are other links and blogs for Dublin and Dublin life which I dip into from time to time.

But this site, of Virtual Dublin, was set up by a friend of a friend of mine and is a fascinating enterprise - if you're into that kind of thing.

I sometimes check in with the RTE website or even with the Irish Times newspaper site to find out what my countrymen are up to.

If you're interested in Dublin nostalgia, I wrote and edited THE DUBLINERS' DUBLIN, a one hour film made in 1988 that gives a potted history of Dublin (for the year of Dublin's Millennium) along with a string of classic Dublin songs. I had the pleasure of working with Ronnie Drew in writing the script - and even have a brief cameo!

I have to confess that there's little about Dublin that I miss aside, of course, from friends and family there. I miss a little my favourite pub, the Long Hall, or more so going for walks in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains. I find Dublin nowadays has a reduced quality of life; all the frenzy of a boomtown.

But from this distance and with contact to some Dubliners, I can remain feeling fond about the place.

roots

On this day in 1990 my Mam died. She was 83 years old and had lived an extraordinary life of hardship and triumph. A year before her death I had sat down with Mam and recorded a conversation with her. After her death, that tape became the basis of what would finally be a book I completed last year; BARNEY AND MOLLY: A TRUE DUBLIN LOVE STORY. It has been a family effort: I interviewed my brothers and sisters and other relatives and built up the book over the years, then my eldest son Bernard set up a publishing company, Ogma Press, with the book as its second title.

A very clever thing my son did was make a slide show of photos from the book, and this slide show can be seen on my website and also at various websites including rootstelevision.com.

Rootstelevision.com is part of what I think is a cultural phenomenon in our newly expanding information age. I have written a book about my parents that has been produced (by my brilliant son Bernard!) as a limited edition hardback only for distribution within the family as well as the paperback edition available through amazon and other outlets (hint hint). But what I've done is part of a need for roots in an age when all is constant change. My children - and one day their children - can read about the birth of my father's father to an illiterate woman in a remote part of Monaghan a mere generation after the end of the Great Famine. I had a phone conversation some months ago with the son of a nephew of mine in the USA who had read BARNEY AND MOLLY with great enthusiasm and was doing a school project about my Dad - his great grandfather - who took part in the Irish War of Independence as a messenger when only twelve years old. Worlds apart yet of the same clan, my nephew's son is spreading this family story and so it lives on.

My Mam, born in Dublin 100 years ago, is preserved in the hearts of her children and grandchildren who knew her. Through the book, her memory remains vivid in our clan. I'm proud of that. Every family should have its historian to maintain our bond with the past as we grow into the future.