Dublin Real Stories

I was in my second year at TU Dublin when I first walked into the community room near Stoneybatter with a backpack full of chargers, a cracked phone screen, and the confidence…

I first heard her voice through the wall on a wet Saturday in Phibsborough. I had moved into a small flat near the canal after my marriage ended, and I was living…

I first noticed him on a wet Tuesday morning in Stoneybatter, kneeling beside a cracked patch of earth near a shuttered shopfront. The street was almost empty then, the kind of empty…

I used to see the boy from my kitchen window every afternoon at twenty past three, still in his school jumper, dragging a bag that looked too heavy for him and holding…

The first envelope came the Christmas after my father died. I was eleven, old enough to know that my mother was pretending not to be frightened, and young enough to believe that…

I had my first panic attack outside the Luas stop at St Stephen’s Green, though at the time I was certain it was a heart attack, a stroke, or some private punishment…

I was nineteen when I started working weekends in a small café just off Grafton Street, the kind of place where tourists came in dripping rain from their coats and regulars knew…

I met Pat on a wet Tuesday morning in Phibsborough, the kind of morning when Dublin seems to be made entirely of bus spray, grey sky, and people pretending they are not…

I met Nurse Bríd on a Tuesday morning in the Mater, the kind of wet Dublin morning where everyone arrives carrying rain on their shoulders. My father had been admitted after a…

I put the first shelf outside our house in Phibsborough because I was lonely and too proud to say it out loud. It was the spring after my father died, and the…