As rents continue to soar and more and more people become locked out of the housing market, Donal Fallon takes us back to the lofty co-operative housing schemes built for workers by the corporations of Dublin and weighs up their experience against similar ventures abroad. In his wonderful oral history of the Dublin tenements, it was pointed out by one wise lady to Kevin Kearns about the tenements of the past … Read More
#FallonsFables: Small Minds, Big Screen
It’s perhaps unsurprising that a country that waged war on jazz music (the music of the Devil, apparently) and which banned many of its most celebrated authors would have a remarkable history of film censorship. Donal Fallon takes a look at how Irish audiences were historically deprived of some of the most ground-breaking films of the day. The Irish state was not the only force at play in keeping … Read More
Stop the Trams!
While Luas Cross City work continues apace in Dublin, there was a noticeable absence of Luas trams at times. The just settled industrial dispute between tram drivers and their employer grew proper bitter at times, yet as Donal Fallon finds it’s certainly not the first major strike involving Dublin’s tram drivers.
While much has changed in recent decades, some things haven’t – there was nothing new about some of the discourse around the recent Luas dispute, depicting workers as overfed and underworked.
If anything would surprise Dubliners of old about the current dispute, it is perhaps the fact there are tramlines at all. When the last Dublin United Tramways Company route closed in July 1949 (the No.8 to Dalkey, for any pub quiz aficionados) many believed they were waving goodbye to a form of public transport for ever.
In the Sunday Independent, one writer made it clear that “I am sorry for the demise of the trams, but as a motorist I just cannot weep for them. They had become an incorrigible block to modern traffic, holding always, as they did, the middle of the road…Yet, the trams are dead, and it is time for them to lie down.” By the 1940s, the tram seemed a relic of the past.
rabble Get Yer Paper.
Newsboys are no longer to be seen on the streets of Dublin today, but in the early 20th century they had a huge visible presence on the street. From the 1913 lockout up to the 1930s, their role in Dublin history is often over-looked . Donal Fallon takes a look at this unique group of youngsters.
Board Walk Empire
It’s difficult not to pass a decorated traffic light pole in Dublin city centre today. While the City Council seem to be working over-time to remove stickers from just about everything in Dublin, Donal Fallon fills us in on how each of the four big football clubs in the city have done their bit to ensure visitors are aware of their presence.
Hibernation Once Again.
Donal Fallon takes a look at the months in the wilderness for the friday night faithful as they find something else to do in the League of Ireland “Off Season”.
MAO 68!
This was not the first time barricades had dotted Parisian streets, but what was different about 1968 was the immediate international coverage of events. To students elsewhere, it showed the way. In Dublin, the ‘Internationalists’ of Trinity College Dublin, a small Maoist student body with influence beyond their numbers, disrupted the visit to the university by King Baudouin of Belgium.
Simms City.
The history of public housing in Ireland is, in many ways, a history of failure. Donal Fallon takes us for a trip in his De Loreon and introduces us to a champion of social housing who designed beautiful European art deco buildings for the city that still stand out as visionary models today. Regarded as a legacy of British rule, slumdom still defined much of the heart of inner-city Dublin … Read More
Notes On Rave In Dublin.
Some of us rabblers have been squirreled away putting the final gloss on this 100 minute feature length documentary about Dublin’s original rave generation. What’s it about? Well, I guess it maps the mood and movement of those who caught a buzz for dance music and watched particular cultural explosion happen in the city across the 1990s and into the early 2000s. A measure of rose tinted nostalgia served with … Read More
A Year Of Rabble In 2016.
Above: Mice nails Regime Teilifis Eireann as a ship of fools in #rabble12. As you lot root around the compost bin for leftover Turkey sandwiches to wipe away the pain of last nights foolery, us rabblers have another listicle to push you over the edge. With the torrent of online content, the pressure on outsider projects like ours to keep up can be relentless – so we decided to take stock of … Read More
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