cover heart of the city

Dublin: The Heart of the City

By: Brendan Walsh , Ronan Sheehan

Publication Date: 1 Jul 2016

18.00

The Lilliput Press is proud to reissue this iconic view of Dublin’s northside docks area in the 1980’s, which comprises the text of Ronan Sheehan and over 50 black and white photographs by Brendan Walsh. Widely regarded as one of the finest studies of Dublin during this period, The Heart Of The City has been taught in UCD and Trinity and to students of Urban Folklore. This edition features a revised introduction by Sheriff Street-born writer and actor Peter Sheridan. Dublin film-director John Carney (Bachelor’s Walk, Once, Begin Again) writes a new foreword.

More poignant still in the aftermath of The Celtic Tiger, this is a remarkable portrait of a people and city so badly affected by the catastrophic collapse of employment on the docks in the 1960’s and by irresponsible urban planning.

‘The city centre is a barometer of how we measure ourselves: ‘inner city’ has become media shorthand for all things negative and I propose its abolition. The city centre is the heart that pumps life to the outer limbs. It is tradition. It is our past. It is now, the living city, and it is intimately concerned with what we are and how. It is collectively owned in a way that Raheny, or Churchtown, Howth or Dalkey could never be. It must be the concern of all when the city is subjected to, at best, atrocious planning, at worst, willful destruction.’ – From the original introduction by Peter Sheridan

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ronan Sheehan was the co-founder of the Irish Writer’s Co-Op, and is the author of The Tennis Players (1977), Boy with an Injured Eye(1983) and The Heart of the City (1988). He won the Rooney Prize for Literature in 1984.

Photographer Brendan Walsh found inspiration whilst assisting German-American photographer Evelyn Hofer in the 1960s and soon began taking his own snaps around Dublin. Much of his work focused on the north city centre, an area where thousands of people were unemployed at that time due to modernizations in the shipping industry.

‘[Brendan Walsh’s] wonderful but undated black-and-white photographs provide a perfect counterpoint to Ronan Sheehan’s narrative of the neglect, despair and poverty that afflicted the communities living in “the beating heart of the city”.’ THE IRISH TIMES

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ISBN
9781843516903
Weight 0.5 kg
Publication Date

1 Jul 2016

Binding

Paperback

Page Count

168pp