Pat Keenan reports on happenings in and around the capital…
In my meanderings on the long lunches of years past, I somehow forgot Scruffy Murphys pub, off Mount Street and within a stagger of Dobbins Wine Bistro on Stephens Lane, run by the late John O’Byrne, who was one of its best customers. Indeed John was not just a restaurateur, he was also a car salesman, sort of specialising in unique odd and rarer cars. My longtime colleague, friend, journalist and publisher John Coughlan bought his beloved MG from him and Scruffy’s brought us all together. Scruffy Murphys was perhaps less long lunch, more an after work get together place.
Both Scruffy’s and Dobbins are in the news again, the better news is that Dobbins Bistro is about to reopen and the news is that An Bord Pleanála has given the final green light to demolish the already closed pub and replace with a six-storey block of 15 apartments. Originally this was a small dingy and the not overly flagrant ‘Sean Murphy’s’ named after the owner. As with so many pups of those time it was not the most hygienic, I remember as a boy thinking that my father seemed to prefer a simple working class bar with a pervading urinal pungency. Legend has it, there was a beehive on the wall outside, so locals called it the ‘Hive.’
Scruffys will forever be remembered for their part of the National Lottery of Irelands Draws. Polish-Irish accountant Stefan Klincewicz formed a ten-person syndicate at Scruffy’s and won a £2.4 million jackpot
The pub was eventually bought and renovated by Paddy Mulligan, one of the renowned Stoneybatter pub family and appropriately renamed ‘Scruffy Murphy’s’.
Scruffys closed in 2016, it’s mostly memory now and fast fading. Its real heydays were back in the 1980s and early’90s. If memory serves me, one big open room with a large rectangular bar in the middle and a mixed crowd of different interests and backgrounds, office workers, media, entertainment and politicians mixed in search of stories for articles, promoting ideas or frankly looking for something, invitations, tickets for major sports events, for concerts, somewhere to be seen.
Recently on RTE a documentary about supermarket guru Ben Dunne there were many references to Sam Smyth, looking forever young, just as he did all those years ago in Scruffys where we would met many times. Sam Smyth the club promoter, band manager and manager of Belfast’s Romano’s Ballroom manager came to Dublin began writing of show bands for John Coughlan in Spotlight magazine leading to traditional journalism and famously to investigative writing in The Sunday Tribune and Irish Independent for editors Vincent Browne and Michael ‘Mickser’ Hand, all regular Scruffy punters. The other Hand, Jim of the entertainment business was also a regular. Jim managed the likes of Johnny Logan, Dermot O’Brien and The Clubmen, The Capitol Showband The Dublin City Ramblers, The Dubliners and comedian Brendan Grace. Michael and Jim Hand even celebrated their joint 50th birthday party together in Scruffy Murphy’s pub.
Ben Dunne the subject of a recent RTE documentary which featured Sam Smyth, a long-time patron of Scruffy Murphys
For further reading: Sam Smyth wrote Thanks a Million Big Fella, his acclaimed investigation of how Ben Dunne o Dunne’s Stores and the head of the richest family in Ireland funded an extension to the home of Michael Lowry, Fine Gael Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications who, as a result was forced to resign from government. This led to a subsequent government investigation that also revealed Ben Dunne gave £1.3 million to former Taoiseach Charles Haughey.
Sam Smyth in one article wrote that minister Michael Lowry was corrupt. Lowry brought a case accusing Smyth of defamation to the High Court. Sam Smyth successfully defended and Lowry lost his appeal.
And there was P.J. Mara who in an earlier life worked in the ‘textiles industry’ when I did some newspaper advertising for his mail-order busnesss, we used his wife Breda as a model. It was one of his less successful business ventures before finding his real calling as a flamboyant but affable political adviser for Haughey, Ahern and the Fianna Fáil party. P.J was always so affable and we joked regularly at Scruffys about money owed.
Scruffys will forever be remembered for their part of the National Lottery of Irelands Draws. In 1990, armed with the knowledge that at 50 cent per line, all combinations could be purchased for £973,896. Polish-Irish accountant Stefan Klincewicz formed a ten-person syndicate at Scruffy’s and won a £2.4 million jackpot, at the time the biggest lottery win in all Europe. When the jackpot reached £1.7 million just before the May 1992 bank holiday, he organised another syndicate to buy all the combinations. Because of new protections introduced by the Lottery they only managed to buy 80 per cent for an estimated £820,000. However there were two other winning tickets and the Scruffy syndicate could claim only part of the jackpot, £568,682 and in the Lotto section the total win went to £1,166,000 approx.
The Eavan Boland Library – a ‘first’ for Trinity College
The Eavan Boland Library
Back in Dublin Dossier May/June 2021 at the height of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movements, Trinity College Dublin began to explore any links through their colonial beginnings to the slave trade and found their great Berkeley Library named after George Berkeley, Ireland’s most celebrated philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne, a high cleric who had a Christian missionary project that began with the purchase of a a 96-acre plantation in Rhode Island, USA, that begun with the purchase of ‘a negro man named Philip aged 14 years or thereabout’ and another ‘negro man named Edward aged 20 years or thereabouts’ Some time later he claimed to have ‘baptised three of his ‘negroes’ in what appears to be Berkeley’s attempt at justifying slavery on the premise it would lead to many more Christian conversions. TCD removed his name from the library. In late 2022 they established the Trinity Legacies Review Working Group with a remit ‘to contextualise and historicise the university’s deep links to colonialism’ with expert ‘evidence-based submissions’ on possible future names for the library. They further opened the review to the students and the general public. Earlier this year Trinity’s College Historical Society joined by debated the naming of ‘The Library.’ Suggestions included Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, The Freedom Library and Eavan Boland. The TCD University Board finally decided on The Eavan Boland Library after the celebrated Irish poet, Dublin born and a Trinity alumna. Historically it will go down as the first building on Trinity’s campus to be named after a woman. Eavan has contributed to Irish and world literature with a vast collections of poetry and prose which she shared and inspired by teaching and lecturing in Ireland and worldwide. During her life Eavan was the author of 11 poetry collections, many essays, prose writings and a collection of German women poets. She worked at both Trinity College and University College in Dublin, at Bowdoin College, the University of Iowa, Standford University, California. Even after she returned to Dublin during the Covid pandemic she continued to teach her worldwide students online.
She was the daughter of Frederick Boland, a diplomat and Frances Kelly, a painter and they lived at Leeson Park Dublin but relocated, then aged five to London when her father was appointed the first Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom and later relocated again to New York. She was 14 when the family returned to Dublin and continued her education at Holy Child Secondary School on Military Road, Killiney, Co.Dublin. Eavan married the novelist Kevin Casey and they lived just outside Dundrum on the edges of the Dublin Mountains with their daughters Sarah and Eavan. To mark her 70th birthday in 2014 she wrote A Poet’s Dublin published by Carcanet Press containing her poems and her own photos of Dublin. She received a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book Awards in 2017.
Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo – another Joycean parallel?
I’m reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, its outside my usual comfort read zone. A case of catch up for me because despite writing about her in Dublin Dossier, March-April 2023, about how she in her previous best selling novels had reset the global view of a modern vibrant Dublin – a city I watched evolve from hard times to better. I confessed to not reading any of them relying instead to watch the adaption of Normal People for television. Somehow now I feel obligated to read her latest novel Intermezzo the latest of her four books, all written in just seven years, all best sellers with highly rated reviews in the world’s media. Another motivation was Martin Doyle writing in The Irish Times: ‘Dublin is a real presence in Intermezzo, more than just a backdrop, another Joycean parallel. Some of her early readers have said it’s her most Dublin book yet’.
Intermezzo is published by Faber and Faber
